Philam Savings Awareness and Values Education Session
Philam Foundation, Inc
The project is a manifestation of the company’s core values of Integrity, Excellence, Malasakit and Kusang-Loob across the organization, creating goodwill and improved community relations for Philam Group employees and its sales force.
INTRODUCTION
Philam SAVES is the Foundation’s advocacy to educate children and their parents and teachers on financial literacy. According to a 2015 Standard and Poor study, “the Philippines was one of the 30 least financially literate countries in the world, with only 25% of adults aware of the basics of managing their money.” This gives the Foundation a big impetus to pursue an initiative that will have an impact on financial literacy, giving birth to Philam SAVES.Philam SAVES educates schoolchildren aged eight to ten years old, as well as their parents and teachers, on basic financial concepts. The project further integrates and aligns the CSR initiatives of Philam Foundation with the Philam Group’s core business and current CSR initiatives such as Philam Paaralan and Kaakbay Philam Volunteer Corps. At the same time, the project becomes a manifestation of the company’s core values of Integrity, Excellence, Malasakit and Kusang-Loob across the organization, creating goodwill and improved community relations for Philam Group employees and its sales force.
FRAMEWORK AND STRATEGY
In a country with a low insurance penetration rate of 1.61% (as of 2016), facing a protection gap of US$528 billion by 2020, there is an obvious need for the market to understand insurance products and, to go one step further, a need to understand the basic concepts of saving. While on one hand Philam Life sees this as a business opportunity, it also obvious that there is a need to be part of the solution in addressing the problem of financial illiteracy.As the CSR arm of the Philam Group, Philam Foundation addresses this problem at the grassroots level by taking financial literacy as one of its advocacies. The program takes a two-level teaching approach: first, through the children via Philam SAVES Junior, to plant the seed of savings awareness and second, through the parents and teachers with Philam SAVES Senior, where the awareness on savings and basic planning and budgeting principles applicable in the household setting are strengthened. Educating schoolchildren at this age sets the stage for them to grasp higher level financial concepts in the future. On the other hand, educating their parents and teachers ensures that these basic concepts learned are also understood and reinforced by the adults who are in the best position to influence them.
To widen the reach and make the program more inclusive, the Foundation engaged internal and external stakeholders, such as employee volunteers, the Agency Sales Group, the Management Team, as well as the government through the Department of Education (DepEd), Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), and the Insurance Commission (IC).
ACHIEVEMENT AND IMPACT
Since Philam SAVES was rolled out last 2017, student beneficiaries have reached 4,214, with parents and teacher beneficiaries at 1,319. 282 volunteers have also been engaged, with a total of 846 volunteer hours rendered. To date, the program has reached 17 partners schools nationwide.The program is tied up with other stakeholders, as well as one of the Philam Group’s partners, the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), where participants of the program are encouraged to deposit their savings to the nearest BPI branch. At the same time, partnerships with other government institutions connects the Foundation with more than 350 local community leaders, as well as the Department of Education (DepEd), Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), and the Insurance Commission (IC).
FUTURE DIRECTION
The Philam Foundation is seeking to widen the program’s reach by institutionalizing its partnership with the Department of Education for its financial literacy initiatives, incorporating it in the schools’ curriculum. This will allow the program to reach all elementary public school in the Philippines and spread savings awareness.The module/activity for the parents and teachers will also be translated into different local dialects to ensure that participants and volunteers can easily communicate the concepts discussed and make them feel comfortable to discuss ideas and questions throughout the session.
Philam Life Financial Advisors and employees nationwide will adopt a school or community where they will regularly conduct Philam SAVES. With an adopted school or community, the program hopes to see continuity and track progress of its efforts.
Moving forward, a significant part of the Foundation will remain focused on education, with Philam Paaralan and Philam SAVES complementing and reinforcing each other in raising savings awareness among the students, parents and teachers in the local communities it serves.
Philam Foundation, Inc, is the corporate social responsibility arm of the Philam Group of Companies. Philam Foundation does its share in addressing societal needs through its three core programs: Philam Paaralan, where classrooms are built in areas affected by calamities and those areas that are unserved or underserved; the Alliance for Philippines’ Health and Advocacy (ALPHA), where the Foundation spearheaded the expansion of the country’s first hospital-based cancer registry program; and Philam Savings Awareness and Values Education Session (Philam SAVES).
