Objective

The Motivation

Financial literacy is a global issue, especially in rural areas, due to the disparities in education and development between rural and urban areas. Shockingly, in developing countries like India, only 27% of the population is financially literate (Business Standard).

Furthermore, in rural India, saahukars (local moneylenders) often spread misinformation, portraying the banks and government schemes as "money extraction scams." Despite the Government spending millions to combat this, a financial knowledge deficit, complemented by this misinformation makes it difficult for people to believe the truth. This usually culminates in poor decision-making, pushing individuals and their families into lifelong debt cycles.

The Idea

"Meri Dukaan" ("My Shop") is a mobile/web application developed by NGO Pratham and UBS that educates rural youths on essential financial concepts such as the benefits of banking and insurance, understanding interest rates, using credit cards safely, taxation and ethical decision-making skills. This vernacular application uses a gamified approach to make education more engaging for diverse groups, laying a solid foundation for sustainable development within communities. We established several objectives while developing the application:

• Enhance Financial Literacy: We aim to educate users about essential financial concepts through real-world scenarios such as managing a virtual shop and dealing with unexpected financial emergencies.
• Combat Financial Exploitation: We want to equip users with the knowledge and skills to identify and avoid potential financial scams.
• Promote Ethical Economic Practices: We want to teach youths about finance's "do's" and "don'ts" by instilling ethical decision-making skills using various in-game scenarios.

Strategy

Bringing "Meri Dukaan" (Demo) to life involved a multi-staged process, each having its own set of roadblocks and, here is our journey:

Deciding the Right Platform:

Deciding the right platform to teach rural youths was critical to maximize the initiative's impact. We soon realized that Technology was the way to go! This is where we asked ourselves: "How do we make youths 'want' to learn and not just 'have' to?" Following this idea, we decided to take a gamified approach along with multiplayer functionality to allow players to collaborate and compete with each other, making education more ‘fun.’ Knowing youths may not have personal smart devices, we also installed this application on smart tablets in the Pratham educational centers.

Developing the Right Storyline:

Our next step was to create a storyline that the players could relate to. Hence, we came up with the following:

"Guptaji, a local grocery store owner, is going on a vacation, entrusting the players to manage his store. The player that manages this virtual store most effectively by earning more money and maintaining the reputation wins!"

This story perfectly simulated economic principles such as earning, managing, and spending money efficiently and ethically.

Gameplay:

We developed a Monopoly-style board game with 26 cells. Each of these cells is categorized as:

• Sell: Players are presented with the list of items the store customer wants. The players calculate and charge the customer that amount.
• Buy: Players spend money to buy store inventory. A low inventory level restricts the player's ability to sell, directly affecting their earnings.
• Luck: This scenario either brings a financial gain or a loss. 
• Decision: Players are offered two real-life situations, one ethical and one unethical. They gain/lose points or cash based on their choice.
• Payment: Players are hit with a mandatory financial loss.

Each round of the board represents a week. The game concludes after 12 weeks. To win the game, the players must maximize the following:

• Cash: The money earned or preserved throughout the game.
• Reputation Points: Store's reputation level. Players earn these points by making ethical financial decisions.

Learning, Testing, and Applying:

We added quizzes at strategic points during gameplay to ensure the effectiveness of the learning process. During a quiz, for instance, if a player does not know the answer to a question, they click on "Help" to start a tutorial about the topic in question. After the tutorial, the player attempts the quiz and applies the knowledge gained.

Scalability, Adoption, and Challenges:

To make this big, we knew we had to support languages other than "English." Keeping this in mind, we developed a very modular application, allowing us to easily add any language without making any logical changes to the code! Furthermore, during COVID-19, we used Cloud and Socket.io to design a new architecture that would allow the application to seamlessly host thousands of players playing and learning from this application from their homes. This update helped us break the geographical barrier, making the app even more accessible.

Results

In 2019, we launched "Meri Dukaan" in rural parts of India with the aim of teaching around 25,000 youths annually across 100 Pratham educational centers. Within a few days of the launch, we realized that the youths loved this game! This initiative quickly exceeded our expectations and by 2021 we hit the 100,000 mark. The Android application is now helping 100,000+ students annually. 

Owing to our modular and scalable application design, we also developed an online multiplayer web version during the COVID-19 pandemic. This helped us connect with 50,000 additional students in rural India, bringing the tally to 150,000+ annual users. 

Reflecting upon this success, we decided to now go global! We deployed "Meri Dukaan" in Singapore and then to China in 2021, where we now help 30,000+ youths annually.

The true measure of our success lies in our students' testimonials. Hence, we would like to share a few testimonials in students' words:

• "My father wanted to take a loan for a tractor; I convinced my father to secure a loan instead of borrowing money from a local moneylender."
• "I was scared of depositing my savings in the bank. But I just opened a Fixed Deposit to earn some interest!"
• "After learning about medical insurance, I encouraged my parents to buy the health insurance to protect the family in times of need."

We are elated to see this positive impact on individuals, their families and their communities, further motivating us to expand globally!

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