Compound Interest
In the society of precarious, financial instability remains the primary source of anxiety and constraint for families from lower income households. Lacking adequate financial literacy, these households struggle to maintain a decent quality of life while battling through the imposed stigma of being branded as social deviants. These public interventions are promoted as ‘exceptional’ rather than ‘universal’ and often comes with a hefty consequence of a laborious application process only to be compensated with short-term monetary reliefs. Therefore, the chronic and unfulfilled needs of marginalised households are rarely resolved in a sustainable way. Compound Interest is an alternative educational programme designed to empower and refine financial literacy among youths from marginalised families. Adapting a non-hierarchical mode of learning, youths can choose to customise and stack their own curriculum. The programme dispenses personalised educational content to its subscribers through various platforms. In this self-sustaining model, the knowledge that youths have acquired through the programme can be redistributed back into their respective households. Accomplishment is therefore measured through cycles of intention, creation, reflection and sharing. The programme aims to rethink the experiences of low-income families as people with the capacity to learn and change, not as clients and recipients in dire need of help and charity.