Financial Training For Migrant Workers Aims To Boost Savings

The Indonesian government is running financial literacy courses to teach some of the thousands of workers who head abroad for jobs how to save and budget the money they earn overseas and use  banking services.

It’s part of a wider government objective of ensuring that more of the $8.3 billion in remittances last year goes toward boosting the local economy, while also expanding access to formal financial services to the nearly 60% of the population here that lives without them.

About 500,000 Indonesians leave the country each year in search of employment, according to the government’s placement and protection agency.

“The less money you have, the more important it is for you to actually be able to have the competency to manage your money,” said Chitrawati Buchori, a financial-education consultant at the World Bank in Jakarta, who is helping the government to develop a training module that may eventually become compulsory.

[“source-blogs.wsj.com”]