(Finance) – On the tenth anniversary of its creation FEduF, the Foundation for Financial Education and Savings established by the ABI in 2014, announces the launch of the Financial Education Alliance, an initiative that supports, in a logic of horizontal subsidiarity, the Italian institutions in the task of raising the level of financial awareness of Italians. The Alliance’s first action will be aimed at schools, in which, from the next school year, financial education becomes by law among the competences of Civic Education.
The Alliance for Financial Education which already brings together all the Participants in the FeduF: ABI and the Italian banks, ACRI and the foundations of banking origin, the world of cooperative credit with BCC Banca Iccrea and the Tertio Millennio Foundation, the public subsidiaries Cassa Deposits and Loans, Mediocredito Centrale and the Institute for Sports Credit, consider it a priority to start an action to disseminate systematic economic and financial culture, continuous over time and widespread throughout the territory.
But the goal of the Alliance is also aggregating companies and entities in the non-banking sector to broaden the scope of the action and make it increasingly structured and articulated.
The presentation of the initiative takes place at a moment of particular importance for FEduF: the celebration of ten years of activity at the Annual Assembly. The event, moderated by Monica Maggioni, is attended by the presidents of FEduF Stefano Lucchini and ABI and Antonio Patuelli, the constitutionalist Sabino Cassese, the mass media expert Aldo Grasso, Father Francesco Occhetta, professor of the Pontifical Gregorian University and Sister Alessandra Smerilli , Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
At the center of the debate are the data emerging from the “Ethics and Money” research carried out by IPSOS for FEduF which highlights how economic and financial education takes on a value perspective and can contribute to the growth of the person both from an individual and a collective point of view. In fact, according to data provided by the research institute led by Nando Pagnoncelli, 80% of those interviewed believe that the lack of economic and financial education limits freedom of choice.
“There freedom it is the fundamental requirement to be able to exercise one’s rights – he comments Stefano Lucchini, President FEduF – and article 47 of our Constitution establishes access to popular savings, home ownership and investment in the markets. Economic and financial culture is an enabling factor to protect this right and must transmit positive life models, promote equity to help individuals and society as a whole to maintain and extend the well-being achieved to all”.
Almost 50% of those interviewed associate the idea of money with the words “commitment, responsibility and success”, while among the negative associations the term “inequity” emerges in first place. Even money, like economic-financial education, has a widely recognized positive value effect, which becomes an integral content of the financial education of future generations: 63% of our fellow citizens consider it a means to achieve individual economic security and stability and 53% as a factor of financial independence and freedom in choices.
(Photo: © Veerasak Piyawatanakul)