Orange Drops - financial education in Turkey
‘Orange Drops’, ING Turkey’s programme to educate schoolchildren about the importance of saving, is helping to build the case for including financial education in the national school curriculum – one student at a time.
Developed in partnership with Koç University and the Turkish Ministry of Education and the Regional Environment Centre, this programme reached 2,500 students and 70 teachers from 25 different schools this year.
The eight-week, financial education programme for eight and nine-year olds aims to strengthen children’s attitude towards saving and to expand their horizons on basic financial concepts, such as forward-looking behaviour, limited resources, needs and wants, budgeting, being patient and taking a role in group decisions.
The unique feature of this programme is that the impact of the training is measured on the economic behaviour of school children. The reason for measuring this impact is to showcase the importance of including financial education in the national school curriculum to the Turkish Ministry of Education.
In the new 2013-2014 school year, the programme aims to reach more than 6,000 students and 170 teachers at 75 schools.
Results of impact assessment
Interim results of the first impact evaluation show that:
- Students have become more patient, future-oriented and have an increased ability to delay gratification, which are two critical factors of success.
- The programme has proved to be more effective for boys in terms of making them patient, whereas the marginal impact on girls is lower due to the fact that girls are already patient in the baseline.
- There is a larger effect on academically successful students (positive correlation between being patient in consumption and school success).
- There is no difference between successful females and males, but no effect on medium and low success female students.
Promoting a savings culture
ING Bank Turkey actively promotes and supports a savings culture. The Bank strongly believes that including financial education in the national education programme will contribute to the Turkish economy in the long run.