Topic: Financial literacy
Some years ago, after an investor workshop for corporate employees, a young woman stayed back to ask me a question. She had been saving for years in a bank account and wanted to invest, but she was afraid of making a mistake she could not undo. “Nobody ever explained any of this to me,” she said. I have heard some version of that sentence in every city I have worked in, and it is the reason financial literacy has stayed at the heart of my work.
It starts with understanding
We often assume people do not invest because they do not have enough money. My experience says otherwise. At the Pakistan Stock Exchange, when we asked people why they stayed away from the market, about 60% said they did not understand how to invest. Cost came much further down the list.
That finding changed how I saw my job. The work was to make the market understandable, and then to make it easy to take the first step.
Meeting people where they are
My own journey began with writing plain-language articles about money, explaining things like stock splits, exchange-traded funds and debt securities for readers who had never owned a share. Over time that grew into a national financial education program, and the most useful lesson was that people learn in different places and in different ways.
- In classrooms: we designed curricula for school, college and university students, drawing on my training in curriculum design.
- In workplaces: we went directly to the HR heads of listed companies and offered employee financial wellness as a benefit. I designed and delivered the workshops myself, moving from the economy and interest rates to specific products and when each one fits, to building a portfolio across the range from cautious to bold.
- In communities: we held investor awareness sessions with women’s chambers of commerce, women’s universities, corporates and city roadshows across the country.
- On their phones: we built an online knowledge center with calculators and courses, a WhatsApp channel, and a trading simulator where people could build a practice portfolio with virtual money. Brokerage firms volunteered to coach participants, so a student could ask a professional for advice before risking a single rupee.
- Through the media: we trained journalists on how markets work, because accurate reporting is financial education for millions of readers.
Learning by doing
Of everything we built, the simulator taught me the most. People who would never sit through a lecture on asset allocation would happily spend an evening building a virtual portfolio and checking it the next morning. Inter-university competitions turned learning into something students talked about with their friends. Practice builds confidence, and confidence is what turns a saver into an investor.
It is one reason I am now working on ideas for game-based financial education, where young people learn to earn, save and invest by playing.
Why it matters for women
Women have been a special focus of my work. In many families, women manage the household budget with great skill and still feel investing belongs to someone else. Every March at the exchange since 2019, we rang the bell for gender equality with UN Women, and the sessions that followed were some of the most rewarding of my career. When a woman understands how compounding works, she rarely forgets it, and she usually teaches it to her children.
Here in the United States
Here in the United States
Since my visit to US, I have been encouraged to see how seriously financial education is taken here. A growing number of states now require a personal finance course before high school graduation, employers offer financial wellness programs, and new initiatives aim to give every child an early start with investing. The tools are different from those I used in Pakistan, and the human need is the same: people want someone to explain money clearly, without jargon and without judgment.
A closing thought
Financial literacy is often described as a skill. I see it as a form of dignity. It gives people the confidence to make their own decisions, to plan for their families and to share in their country’s growth. Every workshop, article and app I have worked on has come back to that young woman’s question, and to making sure someone is there to answer it.
Who first explained money to you, and what do you wish you had learned sooner? Share your story in the comments.