I Started a Financial Literacy Programme at 13. Here Is Everything I Got Wrong First.

When I was 13, I decided to build a financial literacy programme for girls. I called it Finance Matters. And I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I thought financial literacy meant teaching people how to save money. I thought if I could just explain budgets and compound interest clearly enough, everything else would follow. I thought the problem was information — that girls didn't know about money because nobody had explained it properly.

I was right about that last part. But I was wrong about almost everything else.

Mistake 1: I thought money knowledge was the barrier

The first thing I got wrong was thinking that if you give girls information about money, the problem is solved. As if the reason girls don't invest or save or negotiate salaries is simply that nobody explained how.

But the more I spoke to girls — in schools, through our WhatsApp chatbot Diya, through Daughters of India — the more I understood something more complicated. The barrier isn't just knowledge. It's permission. It's the quiet message that money isn't your domain. That someone else will handle it. That being interested in your own financial future is somehow unfeminine or presumptuous.

Financial literacy for girls isn't just about teaching the concepts. It's about dismantling the belief that the concepts don't apply to you.

Mistake 2: I thought the same content would work for everyone

Early versions of Finance Matters were essentially the same curriculum for every girl. Needs vs wants. Savings. Goals. Interest.

What I didn't account for: a girl in a lower-income household managing her family's daily expenses is dealing with completely different financial realities than a girl with pocket money and a bank account. The concepts might be the same but the entry point is completely different. The examples have to be from their lives, not from a textbook.

Finance Matters got better when I stopped trying to teach everyone the same curriculum and started asking: what is this girl's actual relationship with money right now? What does she need to understand first?

Mistake 3: I underestimated how much shame gets in the way

This one surprised me most. Girls would rather pretend they understand something than ask a question about money that might reveal they don't. The shame of not knowing is louder than the desire to learn.

That's why we built Diya — the AI chatbot on WhatsApp. Because a girl will ask Diya a question she would never ask a teacher or a parent. The privacy makes the learning possible.

Shame is the enemy of financial education. Any programme that doesn't actively work against shame won't work.

What I understand now that I didn't then

Financial literacy is not a subject. It's a relationship — between a girl and her own sense of agency. Between what she believes she deserves and what she's willing to claim.

The girls who come out of Finance Matters changed are not the ones who memorised the most content. They're the ones who shifted something internal — who stopped thinking of their financial future as something that would happen to them and started thinking of it as something they are building.

That's the thing I'm still working on getting right. And I'm 14. I have time.

What's the money thing you've been most afraid to ask about? Tell me in the comments. I started Finance Matters because of questions exactly like yours.

— Anaya Deshmukh, Daughters of India