Financial Education Vital to Employment Growth in Bangladesh

In recognition of five percent of the Bangladesh population classified as unemployed and forty percent classified as underemployed, MasterCard has announced the creation of its first grant program with BURO Bangladesh designed to administer financial education to equip the Bangladesh citizenry with the knowledge and tools they need to become more empowered with respect to the management of their financial matters.

In rolling out this initiative, MasterCard based its strategy on the notion that financial independence and autonomy can exist only when people have a basic level of financial education.  The grant program earmarks resources to financial literacy and is targeting training to approximately 100,000 individuals in the country, with a particular focus on the nation’s middle class.

The MasterCard grant program comes on the heels of steady growth in technological and other important innovations in Bangladesh in recent years.  At the same time, however, economic woes continue to hamper the personal financial growth of many of the nation’s citizens.  The program is widely credited with sparking a renewed focus in recent days on the importance of financial literacy in Bangladesh, as it is designed to proliferate the values and virtues of self-determination and empowerment in connection with personal finance and money management.

MasterCard is one of the many global financial institutions that is concentrating its growth plans on nations like Bangladesh, where the credit card and payments giant recently opened its first office given the growth prospects in the nation.  The model of business investing, combined with financial literacy programming, is one that could go a long way towards increasing the rates of financial literacy, capability and inclusion in the months and years ahead.