My fascination with social startups began while on a volunteering trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia, back in 2017.

We had embarked on this trip with the intention to educate youths there on the understanding of basic financial concepts and explore how the principles that underpinned a healthy relationship with money could be translated to meet the needs of their community –and positively impact their lives.

Volunteer experience

The 10 days spent teaching those youths would turn out to be the most insightful week in my 12 years of formal education.

As a fresh-faced college student in his late teens living in the urban concrete jungle that is Singapore, each day spent teaching these youths opened my world up to the privileged society I had lived in with great governmental and financial systems in place to support and grow our wealth.

Unfortunately, that was not the case in Cambodia.

Unbeknownst to them, I learned way more from them than they did from me. While I was educating them on the basic financial terms and resources such as interest rates and deposit accounts in banks, they were teaching me so much more about the power of dreams and responsibilities placed on them at their age.

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The mere fact that they could attend the village school meant they represented the hope of their family. They were expected to be the future breadwinners for their siblings, parents, and even their extended family.

However, they were not weighed down by those responsibilities. Instead, the pressure placed on them motivated them to work even harder and strive to do their best in spite of the difficulties presented. There was a genuine desire to learn and increase their knowledge.

This was most evident when they constantly tried to ask me questions using their elementary command of English. They were not deterred by the fear of being embarrassed and even sought ways to solve the language barrier by asking their local teachers to assist in translations.

This burning quest to learn only served to increase my desire to help them as I sought to explore different ways, such as through illustrations or role play, to explain the relatively difficult financial concepts to them.

Over lunch with the students in the classroom introduced yet another new perspective for me. The power of dreams. Back in Singapore, college students like myself all have similar materialistic dreams along the lines of getting a top degree and earning big bucks in a corporate job.

However, through chatting with the students, I realised how seemingly small dreams are equal, if not larger, than the big dream of making big bucks. For many of my students, their dream was simple. It was to own a motorbike.

They reasoned it would make their commute to school shorter and thus maximise their time in school. To put things into context, the village school served numerous villages in the vicinity, and commuting to school could take up to 45 minutes of walking per direction. This really opened me up to the things in life we take for granted back home.

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The age gap between us dwarfed in comparison to the difference in our daily lives and privileges. The evidence provided paint a chilling prospect. Research by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has shown that Cambodia is home to one of the lowest financial literacy rates in the world.

A land of opportunity

On the flight back to Singapore, I thought about how a future startup could solve this problem that has plagued Cambodia for generations and these were the few solutions I could conceive.

Adopting a bottom-up approach to solve this problem, we would start at the root cause, the mind-set that the youths have towards finance and the lack of financial education in the education system in Cambodia.

Educational startups promoting financial literacy could enter the education framework in Cambodia with the intention to build up the basic financial literacy of youths.

Their aim should be to equip them with sufficient financial knowledge to effectively utilised the financial tools and resources that will be available to them in the future when they transit to adulthood and earn an income.

Research by KPMG in 2017 showed that Cambodia is home to the lowest banking penetration in the region at just five per cent. This is where fintech startups could enter the scene and provide sustainable digital financial solutions for these youths to apply their financial knowledge garnered during their educational years.

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These startups should utilise the uptake in technology to reach out to the youths living in rural areas, where conventional banks are unable to provide mainstream banking infrastructure such as setting up a physical bank branch.

Utilising technology will be the most effective means of bridging this geographical challenge and the tech-savviness of the youths should aid in connecting them to financial solutions that will better protect and grow their income.

While the above solutions involve full-scale startups with significant resources and full-time entrepreneurs leading them, students and youths of today have a role to play too.

Student entrepreneurs form an important part of the startup ecosystem in raising awareness of societal issues. With the power of social media today and the presence of young digital influencers, youth have widespread access to issues on the ground that would have previously gone unheard of. Upon learning of these issues, they can utilise social media to champion for action to solve the problem.

Therefore, they would form the link between the problem and future start-ups that are on the look for future problems by being the voice for these issues and championing the cause for budding start-ups to enter.

Therefore, startups should look for these young entrepreneurs as a sense of what issues the community faces and connect with them to find the relevant solutions for the problem.

In essence, student entrepreneurs should form the first level of a startup ecosystem as they represent the first touchpoint between the issues in the community and the startup industry.

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It is my goal as a student entrepreneur to get involved in social fintech startups that aim to reduce economic disparity and disempowerment in the region.

Startups play a very important role in the business ecosystem in that they aim to disrupt the societal norms and in the process, solve problems that bring about value for people in the community.

My trip to Cambodia certainly opened my eyes up to the issues faced by youths in the Cambodian community. By raising awareness of this problem and sharing my opinion of the potential solutions to solve it, I hope startups with adequate resources can enter and tackle the problems.

Ultimately, they can positively impact the lives of Cambodian youths and give them the chance to lead more financially comfortable lives filled with opportunities for them to succeed.

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Image credit: Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash

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