by Father Mayank Parmar for BISMumbai

DRISTI staff underwent a 03-day online training on financial literacy from 14-16 June 2021, by Swadhaar FinAccess trainers from Mumbai. The objective and goal of Swadhaar is "building a field force of Financial Educators with Swadhaar eFinClass: Partnership Model for Digitally Scaling Financial Education."

The purpose of the 03-day DRISTI staff training was to build on current financial education programme, with some additional investment in technology to develop and conduct a pilot that includes:

1. Developing quality online financial and digital literacy courses to train the field staff for NGOs as Financial educators.

2. Training NGO field workers via virtual sessions, one-on-one Q&A sessions, periodic knowledge check quizzes.

3. Training content which can be embedded and resonates with the issues which partner NGOs work eg: Health, Education, Livelihoods.

4. Equipping field workers with the skills, content, tools to impart training to communities they work in

5. Through this project we propose to build a sustainable “Franchise Model” to scale financial and digital literacy leading to Financial Inclusion.

DRISTI staff went through all yhe 05 sessions, in order to train SHG members of 65 villages of the Kapadwanj Block. They were trained in importance of financial literacy, the need for budgeting, lifecycle-needs, micro-planning in budgeting, and the importance of understanding expenses. They were also informed about the various government schemes, and banking schemes in detail.

DRISTI staff Minaxiben Christian said, "this was one of the best trainings that ever happened online, which was very interactive and at the same time well explained." DRISTI Livelihood coordinator Sanjay remarked, "this training will help in imparting better training in Kapadwanj Block on financial literacy." DRISTI Director-Father Parmar thanked Swadhaar FinAccess' Bhakti Palande - Manager, Training and Content Development, who conducted the training successfully. She also ensured that the training was contextualised to the DRISTI target of 5000 SHG members of the Kapadwanj Block will be undertaken without a glitch.