Skills and Savings to Succeed: Can better financial skills and habits among youth improve their chances of obtaining decent work?

Save the Children’s Skills to Succeed (S2S) program equips income poor youth with the market-relevant skills, networks, and opportunities they need to get better jobs or build businesses. Through an operations research project leveraging the Skills to Succeed program in Vietnam, Save the Children will test if savings promotion schemes and financial education that increase financial capability also contribute to employability and employment outcomes for youth. Few studies have tested the link between increased financial capability and employment for youth, and fewer have included the types of behavioral nudges we will include in our savings promotion schemes using social media. This study, therefore, is designed to assess a) the overall impact of the S2S program with and without a “savings promotion” scheme and financial education and b) the pathways through which greater access to and usage of financial services may affect employability and employment.
We expect that enhanced financial education and encouragement to save will result in increased financial literacy, a pattern of regular saving, and savings accumulation. We hypothesize that, as employability skills associated with workforce success, the concomitant increase in planning skills, tolerance for delayed gratification, and discipline will increase youths’ ability to compete in the job market as well as boost their entrepreneurial skills. For savers, the increase in financial resources will also increase their chances of actually obtaining a desired work by enhancing their ability to cover job search costs or helping to finance the start-up of a small business.

The study is focused on poor young men and women aged 15-24 currently enrolled in public vocational training schools who receive financial-need scholarships in the cities of Can Tho and Da Nang, Vietnam. S2S target groups are deprived young people living in urban slums or who are at risk of working in jobs that, according to the ILO definition, are not “decent” – hazardous, insecure, or unfairly paid.