Family Finances

The Peru Children's Trust supports around 150 families in extreme poverty in the local area by making funds available to help their children go to school. The idea behind this work is that education can be the key to breaking the generational poverty cycle which seems a poor family unable to educate their children, who are then unable to get work and so then in turn have their own family living in poverty.

Paul recently conducted a needs assessment (using a variety of activities to indentify which problems families faced most often and how severe these problems were) with a sample of about 10% of the families to see what their greatest needs were and to see whether we could help them in other ways.
The results showed that a lack of finances was by far and away the biggest felt need
(followed by lack of adequate housing and a lack of adequate nutrition).

Armed with this information, Paul has started thinking about how best to promote family finances
and has come up with a long-term 3 stage project:

• Teaching basic money management and investigating the possibility of setting up a savings scheme so that families can more effectively manage the money that they do have and prepare for shocks (health issues for example) that will inevitably come in the future
• Teaching very basic business skills, either to improve and existing business or start a new one
• For those who are keen to start a new business, working with them to develop a solid business plan and providing micro-credit (small loans) if necessary to allow start-up

Paul is currently writing the money management course, but has started trialling it with 3 pilot families.
It seems, so far, to be both understandable and helpful.