“The most important tool in the fight against poverty and inequality is, without a doubt, education.“: Macraff
The confinement due to the pandemic left various lessons learned in the economic and business field, for example: that remote work, that is, the famous home office, is a valuable tool with which companies and collaborators, together, can generate a strategy to increase their day-to-day productivity, or that urban myth that shopping online was complicated, unsafe and reserved for a certain part of the population.
According to the World Bank, at the international level there are about 2,500 million people who do not use financial services and 75% of people living in poverty do not have access to a banking instrument, such as a simple savings account, which should be worrying especially if we turn to see the Mexican reality where little more than 50% of the population lives that reality.
To understand what the problem is, it must be clear that financial inclusion implies the possibility that natural and legal persons have access to various financial products that allow them to make payments, generate savings, obtain credit or insurance, among others. , that is, a person who has access to financial services has the possibility of optimizing the use of their resources to satisfy their needs. For this reason, financial inclusion has become a priority for many governments at the international level and even the United Nations Organization has stated that the existence of financial inclusion is a factor that allows compliance with 7 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, whose main objective is to improve people’s quality of life.
In the Mexican case, a large number of people who were outside the financial system have had the opportunity to be included because they are beneficiaries of social programs and whose resources are dispersed through the banks, however, the one that increasingly more people have access to a branch (welfare bank) or have a debit card, it is simply a start, because many times this instrument remains a means of saving and withdrawing resources, but not of generating benefits. According to the National Banking and Securities Commission, at the most critical moment of the pandemic there was an increase in the number of transactions and electronic transfers and at the same time a significant decrease in the level of credit that was granted, which generated One question: what is the relationship between making more transactions, the decrease in the level of credits granted and financial inclusion?
The answer is very simple, at the center of everything there is a common term: financial education. Unfortunately, there are two problems in our country: first, the level of poverty that prevents a large number of people from accessing education and financial instruments that could help improve their quality of life, and second, the great ignorance regarding the use of these instruments, there are still those who continue to believe that the use of credit is bad, that financing certain activities through financial instruments is bad, ideas that do little to increase financial inclusion and that, in reality, can be solved with a little education on the subject, but how to achieve it when it is clear that the current administration is not very interested in educational matters? By supporting institutions and associations focused on promoting financial education and promoting that in the various educational spaces in which we have Contact, talk about it.
In the 21st century, it is impossible to conceive that a person cannot improve their quality of life because they do not have access to certain sectors, but even more so, that ignorance is the main obstacle to development in countries.
* The author is an academic from the School of Government and Economics of the Universidad Panamericana, a lecturer, an expert consultant on economic and public administration issues, founding director of the site The Commentary of the Day and regular host of the Voces Universitarias program..