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Women's Health West
Money Matters
In 2009 WHW and the New Hope Foundation organised a financial literacy program with 23 Karen women. We hope that access to financial information early in their settlement could help them to avoid the kinds of difficulties others had experienced.
The Karen community come from Burma and have lived in camps on the border of Thailand prior to their recent arrival in Melbourne.
We employed Karen childcare workers, organised food that women would like and provided an interpreter.
Women want to know about banks, about insurance and about the law. They explained,
'To compare Australia to back home is like water and oil. Here we have money to spend on what we need. In the camps, we didn't have money; we didn't have bills. We had food rations from the non-government agencies. If we want dishes like meat we have to work outside, but if we are caught outside the camp we will be arrested.'
Karen women graduating the financial literacy workshop
The group are on Centrelink benefits while living in private rental accommodation so they have very little money and we focussed our efforts on explaining Australian financial systems and concessions.
Together we found ways to save money.
We discovered that though everyone was eligible for a basic account (without monthly fees), many women had general accounts with fees of up to $5.00 a month. Five bucks is a lot of money in this context! We plan to raise this with the settlement services that assist new arrivals to open their accounts.
One woman said,
'I think this program should continue. New arrivals should go through this so that they know. Even though some of us have been here for two years, we didn't know this. There are a lot more people who need to know these things.'
Thankyou to the Office of Women's Policy for funding this project and project partners who assisted in delivering sessions.