20 August 2024, Johannesburg: PrimeStars a leading youth development and education organisation focused on supporting public schools across South Africa, today announced the launch of an exciting new community empowerment and educational program named Rethink-Rands, hosted by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
According to Martin Sweet, MD of Primestars, 75% of take-home pay South Africans earn is spent on servicing debt and only around 6% can afford to retire at retirement age. He quotes Benjamin Franklin saying “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”, as he explains what the new program is endeavouring to accomplish.
“The knowledge we want our children to invest in, is all aspects of money management: earning, budgeting, saving investing assets & liabilities, income & expenditure, the impact of inflation on our money and understanding financial products like loans and credit cards”.
The premise of the financial education program is to uplift people through creating financial freedom for future generations who will then have the ability to shape their own futures. To create empowered adults who in turn can turn their financial dreams into a reality. “it is the small actions we take today that lead to monumental impact tomorrow” Martin says with passion of a person who has created multiple successful community empowerment programs, including Take a Girl Child to School, Step-up to a Start-Up, What about the boys, and My Future My Career.
PrimeStars currently reaches in excess of 90 000 High School learners across their various programs and they and their corporate sponsors have big ambitions for the new Financial Education program.
The Rethink-Rands concept will not only encompass education on things such as compound interest on savings, credit scores, and investing but will also deal with the other aspects of poor financial management such as lack of spending control, impulse buying, and peer pressure that are often the core to poor financial issues. Sweet says that “money EQ is equally important as Money IQ”. This is often a major flaw in normal financial education.
He expands on this saying that “there is a principle that managing money is more about mind than math”, “that is why Rethink-Rands explores how human judgement and our choices are affected by fear, greed, herding,social pressure, inertia and mental shortcuts, often leading to irrational decisions”.
Their financial education program, co-sponsored by the likes of MTN, FNB, Trans Union and EOH, will include an edutainment feature film, a practical guide, e-learning, social media engagement and sessions with mentors.
Key elements of the program:
- Entrepreneurship
- Financial literacy
- Behavioural Economics
Martin says that “United in our conviction that the time is now to make financial literacy and entrepreneurship a fundamental part of of South African Life”, “this movement will reach thousands of young people by meeting them wherever they are on their financial journey and ensuring that they have access to, ……, the knowledge, tools and resources they need to make informed financial decisions” he says.
Martin Sweet – MD of Primestars
