Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

Importance of financial literacy

Farooq Sobhan

The importance of financial literacy is paramount in the age of the global financial crisis. Familiarity with the idea of saving and investing, and knowledge concerning shares, mutual funds, stock exchanges, and various forms of deposits can help a person face life’s financial inconveniences more strongly than ever before. Sound financial literacy can not only help people at a personal level, but it will also benefit the nation as a whole resulting in a more efficient and flexible economy.

In order to achieve this dream, the general population — especially the young people (i.e. students), should be educated at the secondary level about making strong financial decisions even before they actually are in a position to make them. However, this alone is not enough, as it needs to be complimented by a process which educates the teachers regarding the financial system and how one can benefit from a good understanding of it.

Bangladesh, among the many developing nations, has proved itself a strong competitor in the race towards globalisation. The country’s economy has been mostly resilient to global turmoil, and the subprime crisis has left little impact on Bangladeshi markets as it was not too deeply involved with the world economy. Nevertheless, the capital market here is getting more and more integrated with the rest of the world, and it won’t be long before another financial shock deeply hampers the performance of the country’s economy. The formal Bangladeshi education system is composed of three mediums, English, Bengali and Arabic (Madrassa), where the scope of financial literacy is limited.

The education level of the country is still not in line with international benchmark; moreover, the number of students who drop out of school before completion of their secondary level studies is also relatively high compared to the region. Therefore, there is a dire need to implement a system whereby the young people of the country can learn more about the benefits of using their money more wisely.

One of the problems that Bangladesh faces comes in the form of the teachers at the secondary level not being educated enough themselves on the subject of educating youths about personal finances. Thus, before financial literacy among students can be considered, it is imperative that the teachers know more about the goals and challenges of enlightening the young people regarding the challenges they would face as they make multifaceted financial decisions.

The Commonwealth Finance Ministers meeting in Colombo in the year 2006, called upon the Secretariat to pursue work in the area of financial inclusion. This issue is relevant to most of the Commonwealth jurisdictions; the Secretariat’s work focuses on small states and poor vulnerable economies. The overall objective of these initiatives is to foster economic growth. Such programmes aim to bring banking services to the “unbanked” and to develop financial literacy courses for improving the ability of individuals to act more astutely and make more informed financial decisions.

In 2007, the Commonwealth Secretariat successfully completed a programme in which the focus was to train the teenagers on how to manage their money. The Secretariat’s financial literacy programme kicked off in the Caribbean, and over the last three years this project has educated young people about the benefits of using money more effectively. Since 2007 around 1,200 students in this region have benefitted from this project. More recently, the Secretariat has focused more closely on ‘Train-Trainers’ initiative which have reached trainers in 21 commonwealth countries throughout the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific.

Bangladesh Enterprise Institute (BEI) has extensive experience in working on issues relating to private sector development and in acting as a catalyst for bringing about policy reforms in Bangladesh. BEI through its ten years of research and advocacy experience has many success stories to its name. This includes donor mapping on skills development initiatives, business confidence survey, investment climate assessment, media diversification and liberalization, trade and investment, research on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), civil services training programme (CSTP), corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, advocacy programme for the introduction of a Tax Ombudsman, introduction of guidelines on corporate governance by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) among others, where BEI’s role was key in bringing about various policy reforms in Bangladesh.

In working on these issues, BEI has also established meaningful relationship with key opinion leaders and policy makers in the government and has established strong ties with elites in the private sector. As such BEI is in a unique position to implement this project and can play an important role in achieving the vision of Commonwealth Secretariat on Financial Literacy.

The objective of the project is to train high school teachers (English, Bengali and Arabic (Madrassa) medium) on issues related to savings, investment and protection against risk and to demonstrate how financial products can assist in doing so. The teachers would be then encouraged to disseminate the acquired knowledge to their students. This will be achieved by organizing ‘Train the Trainers’ workshops for teachers from the above mentioned three categories of schools with an overall objective to enable students to use financial information and resources in a more confident manner.

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The writer is President, Bangladesh Enterprise Institute, Dhaka. He can be reached at

e-mail: fsobhan@hotmail.com

http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=152443&date=2011-10-11

Motivating students in learning process

M Ashraf Al Haq

Very recently I joined the University Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). I am back in Bangladesh after 26 years living in different continents – learning, understanding experiencing and engaging in different forms of experiential learning and enjoying enormously. At the moment I am teaching three courses, but teaching entrepreneurship – is a real challenging one. In all courses we have to include a project study plus class participation, home assignments, quiz and midterm and above all a final exam to ensure that the student deserves a grade that he has earned through real hard and smart work. But teaching entrepreneurship gave me an added taste to incorporate a scenario, that – creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship must be incorporated through active motivation and making it interesting to students to do an individual plus a group assignment, in addition to presentation of course contents in the class and implementing those lessons learned in their assignments.

Firstly it was hard to make the students understand as the gap I had in understanding their need, and to adapt to a new challenge. But luckily in two to three weeks, they did comprehend the importance of doing an assignment, which can be challenging and can be implemented if support is there. We have Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department, Electronics, Telecommunication Engineering (ETE) department, Multimedia Science Journalism department, and all the departments are willing that the students come up with nice innovative ideas which can be created and hence will be viewed if it can be implemented in small test cases in real world. Such motivational exploration gave the students to think wise and work harder to achieve a vision to complete the task well before the semester ends. ‘As a trainer we need to inspire the trainees to share and gather and keep pace with ever evolving learning hitches that we can synchronise and visualise from a little to medium to maximum attainment of self learning goals and objectives’. Furthermore, asking questions, and making a point to raise inquisitive questions is important, in class or in home assignment, will change their thinking tremendously.

The students are in their third year from diverse background and majoring in different fields. Some of them are majoring in Human Resources (HR), some in marketing, some in finance, and some in accounting and others from multimedia department. Many students live 50 miles away, and it takes them to come to university more than three hours, and when they return back home it is well beyond ten in the night. Many students have to work more than 25 hours a week to make sure to be able to pay tuition in time, though many of them do receive a good stipend to maintain their monthly expenses.

When I was teaching in Management School of Multimedia University in the 90′s, I experienced that, what counts in teaching business students is sharing the experiencing of the real world scenario in the class room, as just theories will be soon out of their mind. As a great thinker, Confucius in 450 BC said, “Tell me and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” So in that notion I was particularly interested in, and that is why I want to implement and change the paradigm in the students’ learning process. Students have thus started to understand that group study and group work, motivate them to learn and share easily and make the hurdle easier to win. It was difficult just among few students at the start, and they thought to pursue individually rather than as a team, but making them understand that in the real world it is a team oriented approach, so they decided to cooperate at the end.

My firm belief is that I learn from teaching students, my philosophy is learning by sharing. I am a learner and I learn how to share what I know, and eager to learn what I do not know, at least I would not know in advance what might be the response that I will get while sharing. So I am not in a business of teaching, but learning through knowledge sharing and elaborating and just opening the concept to my students. As a master of ceremonies (MC) of a meeting, I might have less to say than more to listen and understand, similarly I want to make my class where students present the topics, share their ideas and understanding, and it is rather a student oriented than a teacher oriented class that I see as my ideal class setting.

We all are created with huge talent, vision, and creative idea. But this can only be tapped – through an external positive push to make that positivism come out. Though the semester not over yet, but I see the mission has been very nicely achieved. The fear of trial and error has eroded and a sense of accomplishment is heading as they have successfully identified key areas where they feel they can make inroads and contribute positively to society. Solomon Ibn Gabriol once said, ‘The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others.’

As there is a student seminar presentation to share their findings, they are very eager to prove, what a good model they have created. I believe, ‘Inspiration needs to be transpired to action to make us motivated as a long term belief and not a short term fun’. Let me share two of the social business models that my two groups of students doing, in brief.

One group of students working on how a formula can be created to make a model rural village sustain from the present pressure of modernisation, in elaborating a chart of traditional village that might be expected when a group of eco tourists look into Bangladesh, as the country is trying its best to project as an eco friendly country to the world. The other group of students trying to promote the beauty of footpath, as the country is heading to an explosion over crowdedness in the cities, so as to incorporate the culture of hiking, biking, and enjoying the concept of promoting the ideal footpath, as a centre of business and eco-tourism, and so on, and explaining to the authority the importance of making, maintaining and managing good friendly footpaths throughout the city’s main linkage points.

If these ideas come out as good, they have an intention to join a competition organised by the Social Business group, where the winner can head to Vienna in November, and the fund providers are there with huge interest to implement such ideas or at least branding such ideas worldwide.

As I have mentioned earlier, not all will be interested, but majority took that challenge and saw an opportunity of international competition and recognition. Some students are very busy working very hard at odd hours for maintaining tuition, and many others commute from distance, but in general the overwhelming majority has an eagerness to do the individual and group competition and show the might in creating a lasting model.

The weaker and unenthusiastic students are joined with stronger ones. The mission was to create a harmonic balance, the result is diverse. In some groups, the stronger ones made the weaker ones learn and share as unavoidable mode of learning, in some groups the weaker ones are more influential in intimidating the stronger group members to flirt unnecessarily. But thankfully that came to my notice, though I admire naughtiness, but the theme must not be forgotten, and I took extra watchful eye and remedial measures so as to get the maximum attainment from all group members. I feel that I am learning through this experiment to a significant extent. ‘Inspiration is heavenly, but the guidance that we can give will motivate the learners to acquire. But the question remains, how to systematically guide and make a valuable notion to the learning processes.’

Our friendly departments such as Media Science and Journalism, electronics (ETE) departments, and many of our colleagues made the task much easier through advice, recommendation, support and help in every possible way. Our CSE (IT) department also played an important role in creating awareness and sharing ideas of exploration in making the projects happen. I thank all of them for their continuous support.

Furthermore, my advice would be that if anyone is willing to teach a course on entrepreneurship, one should take it as an extra challenge of gearing the students to come up with ideas that will change the students world view in leaning and sharing ideas and implementing it. ‘…motivation is related to a positive belief system and admiration. This will decrease the level of stress and improve the environment of leaning’.

Another issue is the conception on reward. ‘A notion of reassuring the progress and reward system, will build the inner inspiration turned motivation sustain longer.’

The writer is a Senior Lecturer, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), and can be reached at email: ashraf.haq@ulab.edu.bd

http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=142963&date=2011-07-16

between the lines
Branding educational institutions in Bangladesh

Mamun Rashid

I was quite intrigued, when a niece of mine studying at Dhaka University’s prestigious business school, IBA (Institute of Business Administration) told me the other day that she expected the business school of North South University to over take IBA within next two to three years. Her comment possibly emanated from the fact that teachers there having taken everything for granted are not so committed towards their students whom they consider very good. Only recently, a senior economist working for a leading think tank , who himself is from Dhaka University’s Economics department, was telling me, how happy he was to see the marked improvement in the quality of the Economics graduates from Jahangirnagar University. I was very surprised to know that a leading private university recruited more than three faculties having graduated from Asia Pacific University’s Pharmacy department, despite the fact that the university is not rated very high.

The other day, when I went to see Dr. Akbar Ali Khan, the former adviser to the caretaker government and a practising economist, he made an observation that most private universities of the country were nothing but business schools. But his assessment may not be befitting in the case of BRAC University, where department of Architecture and Institute of Governance Studies are providers of high standard education. I am sure there are many other departments in North South or Independent universities, other than their business schools, are imparting quality education to students. Not many people may not be aware of that fact. Again, despite having presence in the same vicinity, NSU is much ahead in business education, possibly the university being led by a renowned business professor of our time.

While going through the newspaper pages these days, you will feel sad about Viqarunnisa Noon School or Ideal School. At least I am feeling very bad about Viqarunnisa School, my very loving sister went to that school, along with many other relatives. We were very proud of that school, so are many of my friends, relatives and so on. Six of their teachers (with two already charged), now are on the `black list’, for not doing justice to their students.

There is no denying that we suffer from serious dearth of good schools. And having no option, people will naturally throng to these schools or universities and life will be `business as usual’. Not really. My marketing teacher at Kellogg can never be wrong. When there will be options, the people will give their reply, and at times, quite ruthlessly, like what they do during national elections. Things might turn sour for Dhaka University in the future. Once NSU, BRAC or IUB start attracting and retaining better teachers, ensure good research environment and, in the meantime, people here in Bangladesh can afford to pay little more for quality education, Dhaka University would come down in the league table or may not find a place in the league table, if they don’t do their home work right. No doubt, ten years down the line there will be new inclusions in the league table and few drop outs too.

We were interviewing a few EMBA admission aspirants at NSU, recently. There were a few individuals who had their graduation in engineering/computer science from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology(SUST) and they are now working for Grameenphone. I asked a few of them — what makes them most proud. Almost all of them answered-’our teacher Professor Muhammad Jafar Iqbal’. You see- one single teacher can also contribute significantly towards brand building for an institution.

Liberal environment, mutual respect, learning opportunities, ‘deep dive’ research, commitment to the success of the students, attracting some iconic figures to share from their time-earned wisdom, can make all the differences. Not autocratic or deceiving environment or regimental culture, but a shared vision can help boost the image of an educational institution.

(Mamun Rashid is a banker and economic analyst. He can be reached at:mamun1960@gmail.com)

http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=143297&date=2011-07-19

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