Money Matters: What I Learned Teaching Financial Literacy to Forty Girls Over Six Saturdays

Anaya Deshmukh
Aug 1
10 min read

Updated: Aug 3

Yashodham High School · Mumbai · 17 January — 21 February 2026

The question that started everything

On my thirteenth birthday, my parents opened my first bank account. Somewhere between blowing out candles and signing forms I had never seen before, I noticed something that would eventually become a six-week community project, a fifteen-hour teaching commitment, and the strongest opinion I now hold about girls and money in India.

The elders in the room routed my younger brother into a conversation about the stock market, investing, and — as they put it — “how to get rich.” I was told, quite simply, to save.

Nobody explicitly told me not to invest. Nobody said girls couldn't manage money. But nobody said the opposite either. I had spent the better part of a decade absorbing only one part of the conversation. And I began to wonder:

If a girl spends more than ten years hearing only half of the story about money, how does she ever grow up to feel money is her thing to deal with?

That question is the reason Money Matters exists.

The reframe: it isn't a knowledge gap. It's a confidence gap.

When I began this project as part of my IB MYP Community Project, I assumed I was solving a knowledge problem. Girls didn't know enough about money, so I would teach them. Straightforward.

The research quickly complicated that story.

I designed a baseline survey and sent it to girls at my school and beyond. The numbers came back like this:

54% felt only “somewhat confident” managing daily funds.
85% understood the difference between saving and investing.
But only 41% had received any guidance on how to invest.
35% relied entirely on physical cash.
Only 6% engaged with digital payment apps.

Look at that carefully. 85% knew the difference. Only 41% had been told how. The problem was not that girls did not know. The problem was that even the ones who did know had never been given permission to act on what they knew.

That is not a knowledge gap. It is a confidence gap.

The global context: this isn't just India

I want to be clear about something. The gap I described is not a Mumbai problem, not a Yashodham High School problem, not even an Indian problem alone.

Globally, only 30% of women are considered financially literate, compared to 35% of men. Five percentage points doesn't sound like much until you multiply it across every economic decision made by every household on the planet, every year, forever.

OECD data shows the confidence gap between boys and girls in every country surveyed. NCFE and RBI reports in India show the same pattern — even high-powered career women routinely hand major financial decisions to a male family member. The Bansal & Kaur (2024) Punjab study quantified exactly the same gap I saw in my own school's survey.

The gap is universal. What isn't universal is the willingness to name it and do something about it.

The goal

I wrote my SMART goal like this:

To design and implement a structured financial literacy programme for pre-teen and teenage girls that develops awareness, practical skills, and confidence in budgeting, saving, basic investing, and digital financial safety.

Every word in that sentence is doing work. Let me break it down.

Target group: Pre-teen and teenage girls. Specifically Grades 6 through 8, the window where money habits and self-perception around finance take root.
Area of focus: Financial literacy. Not general life skills. A subject that, quite remarkably, is not part of the CBSE, ICSE, or most state-board curricula in India.
Skill areas: Budgeting, saving, basic investing, digital safety. Four concrete domains, not abstract themes.
Intended outcomes: Knowledge, application, and confidence. Learning that survives the classroom and shows up in real decisions.

I included both skills and confidence because I had already learned, through my research, that knowledge alone is not sufficient. Participants must feel capable of applying what they learn. Otherwise you have taught them the vocabulary of a language they will never speak.

I also designed the goal to be measurable: pre- and post-programme questionnaires to track changes in understanding, practical activities (budgeting exercises, scenario-based decision-making) to show applied learning, and participant reflections to evaluate changes in confidence and engagement.

The plan: six Saturdays, one curriculum

Before I taught a single lesson I sat in the boardroom of the GAET Educational Trust with two women who have spent decades thinking about girls' education: Ms. Sunita Goenka, Chairwoman, and Ms. Usha Raina, Trustee. On 8 January 2026 I interviewed them for the better part of an hour, and the framing of the entire programme came out of that conversation.

Two lines from that interview shaped everything that followed:

“Financial literacy is something schools consistently fail to teach well — and for girls especially, it's almost completely absent.” — Ms. Sunita Goenka

“Girls must hear words like portfolio, return, and compound growth in a safe, non-judgemental setting — vocabulary as confidence.” — Ms. Usha Raina

Both of them told me the same practical thing in different words: frame the proposal as student empowerment and life skills, not as “financial literacy” in the abstract. Make it feel like conversation, not lecture. And do it in the Grades 6–8 window, before the self-perceptions become permanent.

The programme took shape as six Saturdays, two and a half hours each, fifteen total hours of community service. Every Saturday, roughly forty girls from Grades 6–8 at Yashodham High School.

Session 01 — Money, Mindsets & Gender (17 January)
Session 02 — Foundations of Financial Literacy (24 January)
Session 03 — Needs vs. Wants (31 January)
Session 04 — Budgeting (7 February)
Session 05 — Introduction to Investing (14 February)
Session 06 — Digital Safety (21 February)

Taking action: the plan was abandoned in the first five minutes

I want to tell you about Session One.

The school had assured me, in advance, that the girls had some background in financial literacy. I had prepared slides. I had prepared handouts. I had prepared, in essence, for a room that had heard the word before.

Five minutes into Session One, I asked the room: “How many of you have heard the term financial literacy before?”

Not a single hand went up.

I stood there for what felt like a full minute deciding what to do. The slides on my laptop were now useless — pitched two levels above where the room actually was.

Every worksheet I had brought was calibrated for students who had some baseline. The room had none.

So I closed my laptop. I put down my printouts. And I asked instead: “What did each of you buy last week with your own money?”

That was the first pivot. The next fifteen minutes were the most honest conversation I had ever had with a group of girls I did not know. And the entire rest of the programme was, in some real sense, a series of similar pivots — every session rewritten between Saturdays in response to what the last cohort had actually needed.

There were two other moments I'll never forget.

Session Four (Budgeting). Each group received a monthly budget and had to split it between needs, wants, and savings — and justify each choice out loud. A girl who had not spoken once in the previous three sessions entered a full-throated back-and-forth with a boy who had been confused about needs versus wants the week before. She won the argument. She then spontaneously suggested that savings should be split into short-term and long-term goals — a concept I had not planned to introduce for another two sessions.

Session Six (Digital Safety). Our final session, the day of the exit questionnaire. One girl raised her hand near the end and said, almost casually, that she had helped her mother split the monthly household budget last week. And that she had explained to her grandmother what “needs, wants, and grey zones” meant.

Knowledge had travelled outward. Into her home. Across three generations. In six weeks.

That is when I knew the programme had worked.

The four verbs: EARN, SAVE, SPEND, INVEST

Somewhere in the middle of the programme I realised that the entire curriculum could be reduced to four verbs. And that the version of each verb the girls in the room had inherited was different from the version their brothers had inherited.

I built a poster series around the four verbs. Each one takes on a specific script that girls in India are handed and pushes back on it.

EARN.

Your money begins with you. Girls in India inherit a script that says wait — for adulthood, for a job, for someone else to provide. The first rupee you earn, from a tuition gig or a small business or a freelance task, is the start of your own financial life. Earning is not just income. It is the first permission to choose.

SAVE.

Save for something — not from fear. Girls are told to save more than anyone else. The risk: savings becomes a default, not a decision. Savings should have a destination — a course, a trip, a business, a year off, a future you can name. Hoarding is what fear looks like in a spreadsheet.

SPEND.

Spending is deciding what you value. Every rupee you spend is a vote for the life you want. Girls are often taught to feel guilty about spending — on clothes, on outings, on themselves. But guilt is not financial literacy. Confidence is. Know what you value, know what you're choosing, and spend without apology.

INVEST.

Money asleep is money working for no one. Investing is the part of the conversation girls in India rarely get to hear. Portfolio, compound growth, risk tolerance, return — elders use these words with sons. But you have the longest investing horizon of anyone in your family. The math of compounding is on your side.

Each poster carries a small strip labelled “The Words She Deserves” — a list of vocabulary that used to feel foreign but shouldn't. Portfolio. Compound. Return. Risk tolerance. Horizon. Allowance. Freelance. Grey zone. Priority. Automation. Vocabulary is confidence, as Ms. Raina put it. Give a girl the words, and half the barrier disappears.

Money has many names. Confidence has one.

I want to zoom out for a second, because the girls I taught in Mumbai are not the only ones this conversation is meant for.

Money is called by different names in different places. The rupee, the dollar, the pound, the euro, the yen, the yuan, the real, the rand. The specific arithmetic of financial literacy changes slightly across borders. The underlying skill — the confidence to name what you want, to justify your choices, to say “no” to a spending decision and “yes” to an investment horizon — does not change at all.

Wherever a girl is reading this from — Mumbai, Manila, Nairobi, Nashville — the confidence gap looks structurally similar. Which means, gently, that the fix looks structurally similar too.

Reflection: from plan-follower to responsive facilitator

Every IB Community Project asks you to reflect on what you learned, not just about the topic but about yourself. I want to be honest about what mine taught me.

Before this project, I thought service was largely a transactional exercise: I deliver content, you receive it, some learning happens on my end as a byproduct. It's essentially teaching with more paperwork.

After this project, I don't think that at all. Service and learning are not sequential. They are interconnected. The reflection I did after Session 3 materially shaped the design of Session 4. The reframing after Session 5's investing hurdle changed the tone of Session 6. Learning happened during the service, not after it. It was not a byproduct. It was the actual work.

I also thought — before Session 1 abandoned my plan in five minutes — that success meant delivering a pre-planned programme faithfully. Now I think success meant abandoning the plan to meet the girls where they actually were. Every subsequent session was rewritten because the last one had taught me something I did not know when I designed the curriculum.

The single sentence I have taken from this project, and expect to carry into every project after it, is this:

Service is not the execution of a plan. It is the continuous adaptation of one.

The numbers, in the end

At the close of the six weeks, we ran the exit questionnaire. The programme was formally verified by my school. Here is where it landed against the success criteria I had written into my original goal:

Educational Reach & Structure — 100%. All planned modules delivered across six sessions and fifteen hours.
Participant Confidence & Concept Mastery — 92% of participants felt confident explaining complex terms like compound interest. This exceeded my target.
Project Adaptability & Feedback Integration — 100%. Every session was informed by the previous one's reflection.

On 20 February 2026, my school's Vice Principal, Ms. Anuranjani Sikka, issued a formal letter of confirmation:

“The programme measured a tangible shift in students' willingness to discuss financial goals and their confidence in daily decision-making.” — Ms. Anuranjani Sikka, Vice Principal, Yashodham High School

She verified my 15 hours of service, the independent organisation of the programme, and the visible improvement in the girls' financial confidence.

What I want you to take from this

If you are a girl reading this: the vocabulary of money belongs to you. Not eventually. Now. Ask the questions your brothers ask. Sit at the conversations your uncles have. Learn the words — portfolio, return, compound growth, risk tolerance — and use them the way they were meant to be used: as tools for your own decisions.

If you are a parent, teacher, or mentor: notice which script you are handing to which child. Girls in the Grades 6–8 window are extraordinarily receptive to being trusted with real financial responsibility. Give it to them.

If you run a school: financial literacy is not currently in CBSE, ICSE, or most state boards. It should be. Until it is, someone in your community will have to build it. It does not require an economics department. It requires six Saturdays, a curriculum that is willing to be rewritten, and forty girls in a room who are more capable than any of us assume.

Poster gallery — download and use

Every visual referenced in this blog post is available as a print-ready vector PDF. Educators, parents, and school administrators are welcome to download, print, and display them — school halls, classrooms, community centres, community boards. All are part of the Money Matters advocacy series.

Financial Literacy is for Girls (24 × 24 in advocacy hero)
The Goal, in Full (16 × 24 in comprehensive SMART goal)
Global Context — Fairness & Development (A3)
Investigate / Plan / Act / Reflect (four A3 posters, one per criterion)
EARN / SAVE / SPEND / INVEST (four 17 × 11 in landscape posters — the Money Vocabulary series)
A World of Currency (48 × 8 in horizontal banner)
The 4-Stage Timeline (A1 hallway display)
Money Matters Brochure (4-page A4 field record)

A note on why this lives here

This blog post lives on Daughters of India because Daughters of India was, in many ways, where this project began. Everything I learned about approaching difficult conversations with girls, about listening before teaching, about not confusing information with empowerment — I first learned inside this community.

Money Matters is not a stand-alone project. It is one chapter in a much longer story that Daughters of India has been telling for years: that girls deserve to be trusted with real responsibility, real conversation, real tools. My six Saturdays at Yashodham High School were one small addition to that ongoing argument.

The next cohort begins soon. The rest of the argument is still being written.

— Anaya Deshmukh, MMXXVI