PAL Pension boosts financial literacy in schools with arts, essay competition

Winners have emerged from PAL Pensions Art and Essay competition as part of the company’s bid to support financial literacy. Entries for this competition came from 200 secondary schools nationwide which is part of the company’s corporate social responsibility project aimed at creating the necessary foundation for wealth creation.

For PAL Pensions, good financial judgment, savings culture, among others are at the heart of wealth creation. And to inculcate this important culture among Nigerian youths, the pension fund administrator has taken the campaign into schools across the country, providing free financial education as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility projects.

Speaking at the prize giving event for the successful participant in Lagos, recently, the Regional Manager, Lagos, Mabel George, hinted that PAL Pensions had its financial literacy initiative launched in response to the need to provide Nigerian students the much needed financial education which she said was lacking in their school curriculum.

According to George, the desire to arrest a situation where Nigerian youths do not get to know how to manage money, save, or even develop entrepreneurship skills and right financial judgement up until they start working spurred PAL Pensions’ choice of CSR in that direction. “What we have found is that most schools do not have financial literacy in their curriculum. And so you find people who go up until tertiary institutions and even graduates who do not know how to manage money. They don’t learn it until they start working. So, we thought that it is important we start to educate students at the grassroots, she said. “We have covered 200 schools, introducing financial literacy clubs.

“In 2015, we introduced financial literacy clubs in some select schools. And so, in 2016 what we thought to do was to have a competition among the schools across the country. We had two categories – arts and crafts as well as essay writing. The students were required to show how they can use either arts or in essay form project and describe what financial literacy is to them.”Speaking further, George stated that financial education teaches students independence and what to do with resources that are at their disposal.

Adding that the establishment felt providing the students with such knowledge at the early stage of their life would expose and equip them with the skills to recognise and explore opportunities. “What we are doing is that from this stage, we want the students to learn how to save, have entrepreneurial skills and know what to do with money. What financial literacy does is to create independence.

We want them to realise that beyond leaving school and the search for 8am to 5pm job, there are other skills they can harness at a younger age that could be very helpful at that point.”Nigeria is a country of over 150 million people and every year millions of people graduate to join the overburdened employment market. For us, we want to have more people who have entrepreneurship skills, so that beyond looking for a white collar job as difficult as it is getting now, people can be independent and be more financial savvy. We want to have people who are more conscious as to how to manage funds better. We want to people who will be better managers and custodians of little income, that no matter how little the income, they are able to manage because they have built the skills.”Standing tall in the competition that recorded 120 (90 essays and 30 arts) entries from across 200 schools nationwide were Titus David, Nneoma Mbalewe and Quadri Uthman as the first, second and third position winners. Presenting the winners with their prizes, the first prize winner, a JSS 2 student of ASCL School 1, Kogi State, David, smiled home with a tablet while winning a desktop computer for his school. Also, the first runner up, Nneoma of Babcock High School won a school bag with educational kits as well as winning a 3 in 1 printer for her school, while the second runner up, Quadri won a school bag and other educational items while his school got a white board.