Banking on Youth: A Guide to Developing Innovative Youth Savings Programs

This toolkit presents Women’s World Banking’s approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating savings programs for low-income youth, based on its experience providing technical assistance on programs launched at three financial institutions in three countries. It is based on the tenet that every financial institution has its own institutional strengths and weaknesses, positioning in the market goals for the future, and other characteristics that collectively make its situation unique. This toolkit is useful for those who are already offering products to youth but are looking for new ideas and strategies to improve performance. It is designed to be useful to a wide range of financial institutions, from small MFIs to established retail banks. The toolkit covers the following sections in detail:

• Rationale, business and social cases for offering youth savings programs, different youth savings typologies, and planning process for a youth savings program;
• Explanation of planning, assessment, and customer research process with a focus on partner identification and development and discussion of prototypes that have already been tested;
• Developing, monitoring, and assessing a pilot and preparing for next steps;
• Program evaluation both at the client and institutional level;
• Comparative chart of youth savings products mentioned in the report.