Youth camp tackles the big challenges in financial education

Ms Matembe was a lawyer in her home country and her husband an accountant. They arrived in Scotland with ample cash resources, but this alone was not enough to overcome structural barriers and human bias within the financial system.

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“The biggest challenges were, without a credit history and without a credit rating, it was really difficult to integrate,” she said. “You don’t have a credit history so you can’t access better products, and in terms of services such as insurance and that kind of thing we were paying premiums, again because of not having a record of us.”

Under scrutiny because they lacked a UK credit history and possessed a large sum of cash, their struggles extended to the basics of opening a bank account.

“We were without a bank account for the longest time and going around in circles,” Ms Matembe said. “One, we need a bank account to get paid, but to get the bank account they want evidence of an address and all of these things we were still looking for [because] we were staying in a hotel for a while when we first arrived.”

Issues with opening an account were eventually bypassed when in a stroke of good fortune their former bank in Uganda was taken over by Barclays, and with that group’s international reach they were able to access their previous banking statements. Other obstacles associated with the “poverty premium” – the higher rates charged for things like credit and insurance to those with no credit rating or deemed “high risk” – took longer to overcome.

Within a year of arriving in Scotland they had their first child, and as their daughter grew older they started thinking about the situations they had been through with moving to a credit economy from the cash-based principles that are predominant in Uganda.

Ms Matembe said school has “certainly not” prepared her daughter, now aged 15, to manage money. When she and her husband started searching for resources to plug this educational gap, what they found was “very scanty and very theoretical”.

“We couldn’t find anything suitable, so we started trying to create resources, playing board games, and bringing people together who had a similar background to do that because we had found that [many] in the international community have similar issues,” she said, “and it just grew from there.”

She started delivering practical programmes into local schools and had just completed a successful crowdfunding campaign to extend this further when the Covid pandemic arrived in the UK. The business model “died overnight” with school closures and social distancing restrictions and Ms Matembe came close to giving up, but then organisations working with immigrant groups began seeking her help with the particular difficulties faced by newcomers to this country.

“The Covid-19 pandemic exposed some very intricate issues in these communities,” she said. “You had people who were passing on and dying intestate without wills and without any plans in place here, but that doesn’t mean they were poor. They had wealth and they had facilities set up in other countries, but that wasn’t being communicated in a will.”

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This year’s first Youth Money Camp was held in May in Stirling and the next is scheduled to take place at the University of Edinburgh Business School on September 27-29. About 10% of all places are reserved for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, with their places paid for by sponsors.

Ms Matembe said more businesses in the financial services sector need to “put their money where their mouth is” when they talk about the value of financial education.

“Businesses have a consumer duty to make sure that their customers and their people are okay, and they need to do that by not just saying they believe this but by putting money towards that,” she said. “The same way we are putting money towards going green, the same way we put money towards our marketing budgets, money needs to be put into consumer wellbeing and that is the responsibility of any organisation that is offering a service to anybody.”

Human bias continues to hold undue sway, she added, recalling one incident when she was told by the representative of a financial organisation that the firm couldn’t work with her because clients of MoneyMatiX are typically migrants and people of colour who “don’t have money”.

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“I was told that the person that they serve is a middle-class, middle-aged man sitting on a lawnmower, and my response to that was: ‘What makes you feel my husband is not one of those men?’.”

Bias is also a major barrier for others who are often reluctant to open up about the scope of their financial struggles for fear of being judged.

“You are then offering support that isn’t relevant for the person because you don’t have the full picture,” Ms Matembe said. “The youth camps have been a good way of breaking that ice.

“We have had so much success with people coming to attend the youth camps just to see what their children have been up to for three days, and then feeling comfortable enough to say: ‘Listen, I’m actually having a housing issue and I am struggling with this – what can I do?’.”