Learning and empowerment: Designing a financial literacy tool to teach long-term investing to illiterate women in rural India

The objectives of this paper are two-fold. First, it aims to bring attention to the learning and educational needs of the almost one billion illiterate adults in the world who have little or no means for furthering their education in traditional settings. More than two-thirds of illiterate adults in the world are women and their education can have an immense impact on societal development. When we think of learning in its cultural context through social interaction, this population presents a unique vantage point to test and extend our theoretical ideas. Second, the paper presents an exploratory case study that demonstrates how research on learning can guide human empowerment by addressing everyday problems and how addressing these problems, in turn, can contribute to our understanding of how people learn. Specifically, we present a design-based research and implementation case of a financial literacy tool constructed to assist learners in understanding the advantages of long-term investment. Our findings demonstrate the advantages of leveraging the local context to construct teaching aids and supports viewing learning as the creation and enactment of situated practices.