When the central bank, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, set out to create a new financial literacy programme earlier this year, its officials turned to Mario Deriquito, president of BDO Foundation.
While the corporate social responsibility team at BDO Unibank was signing that memorandum of agreement with BSP, it announced that the foundation had just finished rehabilitating four health facilities in Bohol. This brought the tally for rehabilitated rural health centres to 140 over the last decade in underserved communities around the nation.
In 2022, BDO Foundation focused on a vital, but rarely supported economic constituency: fishermen. The bank has partnered with the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), the Fish Right Programme of the US Agency for International Development (USAid), and BSP to devise financial education schemes for fishing communities.
The rationale is to better target efforts to raise the Philippines’ comparatively low financial literacy levels. According to studies cited by BSP, survey respondents can adequately answer only three out of seven questions about basic numeracy, compounding interest, inflation and investments. Such findings motivated BDO Foundation to develop new strategies to promote financial inclusion and implement financial education programmes that increase economic success rates in remote areas.
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