Starter Kit. Idea 339 of 500. Cluster 16
Money-management courses for the worker going abroad, before departure, with the products for sending money home built in
The mechanism, from the book
177,000 qualify every year and 45,000 get a place. The other 130,000 are a market that nobody has built for, and the polytechnic is not a second choice when it leads to a job.
The first step
Write a 2-hour session on budgeting abroad, sending money home safely and saving, and ask a licensed recruitment agency to let you run it free for their next group of departing workers. Ask the workers afterwards what they would have paid, and ask a bank or money-transfer company whether it would pay per worker to present its products. A paying sponsor is the proof.
- Who pays first
- A bank or money-transfer company that wants migrant workers as customers before they leave, and pays per worker reached.
- What leaves today
- Migrant workers send money home through costly channels and spend it without a plan, so less of their earnings becomes savings.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment. Ask whether a money course before departure could run alongside their existing training.
Check before you spend
Whether a sponsor's products may be presented in the session, and that the course stays advice on budgeting, never selling a financial product yourself.
Find out these three numbers
- What would a bank pay per worker to present its products?
- What do workers lose each month in fees sending money home?
- How many workers leave through one agency each month?
A comparison from the book
The remittance economy. Chapter Eight
"The remittance economy is not free."
Workers carry the costs privately; a good course cuts some of those costs before they leave.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.