The Edufinet Project, a financial education program promoted by Fundación Unicaja and Unicaja, has celebrated this year for the first time the ‘Semana del Mayor’ (Senior Citizen's Week). This initiative, aimed specifically at senior citizens with the aim of promoting their financial and digital inclusion and which has had more than 200 participants, takes the baton from the annual event that Edufinet has been developing these last two years as the ‘Senior Citizen's Day’.
Given the good reception and the growing demand during this time, the said financial education initiative has extended its duration for a week, to now become the ‘Edufinet Senior Citizen's Week’ and it has been held for the first time in four municipalities in the province of Granada.
In the framework of this action, which has the collaboration of Funcas Educa and the network of centers Puntos Vuela of the Junta de Andalucía, Edufinet has carried out during the past week, from 16 to 20 June, four training sessions in the towns of Alhama de Granada, Guadix, Píñar and Fuente Vaqueros. In total, more than 200 seniors have benefited from these sessions, coming from around twenty towns in Granada, both regular users of the four Puntos Vuela that have collaborated in this initiative, as well as those from other neighboring towns.
The goal is to promote and favor the financial and digital inclusion of this demographic, in an educational and practical way, with special attention to the rural environment. In short, the aim is for these users to acquire the necessary skills to enable them to manage their finances with greater autonomy and to improve their skills in the use of digital banking in its different formats. Also in terms of cybersecurity, so that they are able to identify and prevent possible financial fraud and cyber threats in various channels and contexts, as well as in online operations.
In each of these sessions, lasting an hour and a half, Edufinet professionals, in addition to explaining the work carried out by this financial education program, focused their intervention on cybersecurity and developed a practical and fun workshop focused on digital finance and related topics, to help this group to navigate safely on the Internet, as well as to detect and avoid possible scams and cyberattacks, especially when carrying out certain financial transactions and online purchases. In short, the aim is for these people to incorporate certain guidelines on security in their daily lives, in order to be prepared and protected against the presence of risks in different scenarios, especially in the digital banking environment (mobile applications and websites) and ATMs.
Senior citizens, a priority group
The Edufinet Project has been promoting financial education actions for two decades, making it one of the pioneering financial education and inclusion programs in Spain. It currently has the collaboration of 17 universities and ten business institutions and organizations, with the aim of increasing the economic and financial skills and knowledge of the population.
Senior citizens are one of Edufinet's main groups of interest, as evidenced by the development over time of various specific training activities for them (face-to-face and online). The aim of these sessions and workshops is to improve their knowledge of financial education in order to ensure that they make the right decisions in the field of economy and finance, as well as to favor their technological transition, thus helping to reduce the digital divide.
Among other financial and digital training actions aimed at this group, the Financial Education Workshops for Senior Citizens and the ‘Ambassadors Project’, acting mainly in rural areas, also stand out. Both projects have 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. They were also awarded in the CECA Social Work and Financial Education Awards 2023-2024, with the First Prize in the category of Financial Education in the section for the Seniors+65 years old.
