Financial literacy to be taught in schools

Government is adjusting the secondary school curriculum to promote entrepreneurship education among young people at an early age.

This was the key point in an address delivered by Minister of State in Foreign Trade and Business Sandra Husbands during the opening ceremony of the Small Business Association (SBA) Youth Forum, held at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre on Wednesday.

She said it was important for young people to be exposed to entrepreneurship as a viable career option and told those in the audience about the Government’s plans to introduce it into secondary schools.

“You need to start the discipline of managing money from now; you cannot wait until you start a business to learn it because by the time you learn it in business, you would have burnt a few businesses before.

“So you want to start early learning how to manage your savings. As part of our commitment as Government to you, we are starting a financial literacy programme. It has started with businesses where we go and share with people in various workplaces the best ways to manage their money, the best ways to save money and the best ways to make more money.

“But we believe that we must go further as a country and start much earlier. We want to be able to bring this into the schools. You will see in the programme in the Ministry of Education that one of the new features that they will include in your curriculum will be financial literacy and the Ministry of Small Business Development will be partnering with them to achieve that result. We believe that if we are going to build wealth, we have to teach you how to manage wealth,” Husbands disclosed.

During the opening ceremony, the SBA’s chairman Charles Carter noted that in today’s world, everyone wanted results immediately but did not want to put in the required work.

He said this type of mindset was diminishing the work ethic among young people, and highlighted that social media made things appear as if they were easy to achieve.

Two hundred students from 11 secondary schools across Barbados took part in the forum. They got the opportunity to interact with entrepreneurs who displayed their goods and services at the event and engage in robust discussions with experts in related fields about the benefits of owning and running a business.
(SZB)