The Edufinet Project, a financial education program promoted by Fundación Unicaja and Unicaja, concludes the third edition of its Ambassadors Project, which began last April and in which more than 800 senior citizens have registered. This is a financial education initiative, specifically aimed at this group, especially in rural areas, with the aim of promoting their financial and digital inclusion.
Specifically, this year, more than 90% of those enrolled in this program, which has the collaboration of the centers of the network of Puntos Vuela and Funcas Educa, came from rural areas of a hundred localities, all users of a total of 96 Puntos Vuela centers of the Junta de Andalucía.
In this edition, senior citizens acquired new competencies and improved their financial and digital skills through an online course, which consisted of a total of ten sessions, held one day per week, accessible through the Edufinet Project's YouTube channel.
During these one-hour sessions, Edufinet trainers have explained general concepts and basic notions about personal and digital finance, with the aim of enabling users to manage their own finances with greater autonomy, as well as to become familiar with digital banking in its different formats.
In this sense, they have provided senior citizens with practical advice on the use of ATMs and mobile banking applications (with the help of the corresponding simulators developed by Edufinet), and they have also discussed different issues related to money and means of payment, basic financial products that are part of a bank's offer or personal financial planning, among other aspects.
During this course, special attention has also been paid to the field of cybersecurity, with the aim of making participants aware of the main risks involved in the current digital environment and their prevention; the most common cyber frauds in various channels and contexts, in addition to transmitting useful recommendations for online shopping, as well as for the identification of real offers and discounts on the Internet. All this, without forgetting the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which these people have been able to approach during these sessions, through a brief introduction to this type of technology and its application from the point of view of finance.
Within this initiative, Edufinet, in parallel, has also offered senior citizens the opportunity to join its work team, as ‘ambassadors’. Their work, carried out on a voluntary basis and with a permanent vocation, is to act as a channel of liaison with other seniors in different municipalities, in order to know their main needs and concerns, thus favoring the adaptation of the contents that Edufinet provides to this group. In order to act as ‘ambassadors’, these people had to pass this online course beforehand, with the aim of being able to transfer, in collaboration with the Edufinet Project, the necessary knowledge and skills in financial education to this segment of the population.
Specifically, the Edufinet Ambassadors Project, together with its general Financial Education program for seniors, has been recognized this past year with the Finance for All 2024 Award, granted by the Financial Education Plan, for the best financial education initiative developed by non-collaborators. It was also awarded in the CECA Awards for Social Work and Financial Education 2023-2024 with the First Prize in the category of Financial Education in the section of Seniors+65 years old.
Senior citizens, a priority group
The Ambassadors Project is part of the set of actions developed by Edufinet, within its educational program open to all citizens, where the elderly are a priority group of interest. This commitment is evidenced by the implementation of various training activities, both on-site and online, aimed at adults in general and senior citizens in particular, which are carried out throughout the year.
The financial education workshops for the elderly, the Ambassadors Project and the Senior Citizens Week are some of the initiatives promoted by the Edufinet Project, which aim to respond to and highlight the need to offer more training to the over-60s to ensure their financial and digital inclusion.
Likewise, during these training sessions, this group has at its disposal a wide variety of didactic resources as support elements, among which the ATM and banking app simulators created by Edufinet, under the generic brand ‘Edufibank’, stand out.
In 2024, the Edufinet Project reached more than 5,000 elderly beneficiaries through nearly 200 sessions of this type of initiative.
