Institute to educate children and youth about financial management

Friday, Mar 21, 2014

Dubai: Sa’ad Al Rubaiaan, a UAE-based entrepreneur, launched the first financial institute to educate children and youth on how to manage their finances.

Fils Planet, is a Dubai-based institute aiming to teach children and youngsters (Ages 7-17) about financial education through innovative programmes and events, Al Rubaiaan said.

Why it is Fils Planet? It is because managing money wisely starts with the smallest component of the currency, the “Fils”, where children and youngsters get exposed to a new “planet” of financial edu-tainment!

The main courses of the institute are focusing on the four financial skills — saving, spending, investing and gaining.

He added that market research showed that the need for such a niche audience and unique services are high, considering that the competition currently is either missing some parts of the financial education or is being delivered for commercial purposes and is mainly offered for adults.

“We believe that teaching financial education to children and youngsters is a collaborative effort and responsibility especially in the Arab world.”

“In our region we lack the financial management in our lives and we don’t have control on our spending that most of the time lead us into huge debt. And recently a big number of our youth are suffering the burden of debt and affected their lives negatively.”

To avoid the trap of debt we have to start educating children and youth on budgeting, objective saving and reasonable spending.

“We are trying to insert this kind of educational elements to be an integral part of their lifestyle,” Al Rubaiaan said.

Parents

While the institute aims to target students (aged 7-17); who are fully dependent on their parents/families as their main source of income, training programmes are also offered to parents through interactive workshops which guide them to raising financially responsible children.

Arwa Al Qasim, Al Rubaiaani’s wife and main partner in their new business, said that they benchmarked their studies based on the best practices in this field across several world countries including Singapore, UK and others.

“We customise the institute courses to suite the children and youth in the region and especially the needs of over 200 nationalities in the UAE,” she said.

The curriculum has been developed by a specialised consulting team in which they benchmarked the curriculum with international best practices. The curriculum has also been customised to fit in the local market and culture, incorporating socially specific concepts from Islam, such as “Sadaqa” (giving to the poor), “Eideya” (giving money to children during Eid), “Zakat” (donating to the poor from one’s savings) etc, Arwa said.

She added that the new concept of this new kind of education is that they merge education with entertainment to simplify the aforementioned sophisticated topics.

As an example, she said public events for children and youngsters (7-17 years) in the form of a one-time interactive workshops or outcome-based training courses which consist of 10 interactive sessions for each age group.

Personal e-training and interactive workshops for parents on how to raise financially educated children are also included in the courses.

By Zaher Bitar Senior Reporter