Financial Inclusion of Low-Income Families and Persons with Disabilities
DBS Foundation is committed to improving the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable communities amongst us, by scaling impact with businesses and community partners. For this project, they wanted the class to explore the factors that enable or prevent financial inclusion of low-income families and persons with disabilities. Their findings would therefore complement DBSF’s efforts in supporting the two segments – low-income families and persons with disabilities.
The project was largely student-driven, where students were empowered to be independent in generating research and content.
Students were divided into two teams: those looking at financial inclusion of persons-with-disabilities (PWDs) and low-income families (LIFs).
Students worked in teams to develop the best outcomes leveraging their different interest and strengths.
For each team, students further self-selected into functional groups based on their professional interests (research, writing, marketing, and multimedia/ events) to jointly produce:
(i) a final report detailing their findings aimed at educating the public as well as
(ii) a video summarizing and promoting this report. Leaders were appointed for each team to promote clearer accountability and recognize those who go the extra mile.
Students were able to come together to discuss and share their insights to facilitate peer learning. While they split up to produce this output more efficiently, information gathering and direction setting were done as a group. All teams took part in the research process regardless of their functional roles: reviewing research and participating in “fieldwork”.
Students also gained hands-on experience on the ground. For the PWD group, this comprised multiple visits to social enterprises, government agencies, and private sector players as well as interviews with senior practitioners/ stakeholders to understand the barriers to employment of PWDs, a key enabler of financial inclusion. For the LIF group, field research mainly involved interviews with residents of rental housing flats in five geographical regions across Singapore to understand their perspectives as well as consultations with a social enterprise who help lower income women to confirm the broad validity of insights.
Both the LIF and PWD groups successfully managed to go through the vast literature on the topic of financial inclusion for their respective target groups to zoom into key issues and trends within Singapore’s context. While broad deadlines were provided, students managed their own progress within the teams with the help of their leaders.
Multimedia teams also had full creative discretion, subject to addressing the comments of instructors and their classmates.
Within this framework, students created quality content in the form of a report and a promotional video for each team.
Financial Inclusion of Low-Income Families
- Video link
- Report link
Financial Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities
- Video link
- Report link
“I was pleasantly surprised at the professionalism, initiative, and commitment that most students displayed. Despite the time constraints and requirement to work independently after some initial preparation by the instructors, they managed to produce rigorous content that would be valuable and easy to digest for the lay reader. My hope is that members of the public will go through the content and begin to empathize with the complexities and challenges persons-with-disabilities and low-income families face in becoming more financially included in our society." -- Nathan Peng, Faculty Instructor, Social Sciences Practicum
“Over the past 10 years DBS Foundation has supported many SMEs and social enterprises, who are using their business to empower the lives of vulnerable communities. We have also partnered with organisations in the community to develop holistic solutions. We are glad to partner with SMU on this module to provide students with real-world perspectives on sustainability to complement their academic learning. The students have done great work in providing in-depth observations about the two segment groups, after visiting DBS Foundation’s partners such as SG Enable, Inclus, Bettr Group and Foreword Coffee. We hope to continue providing such opportunities to empower students to drive change and build a better world.” -- DBS Foundation (Project Sponsor)
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