PUOI - Percorsi Opportunità Istruzione
Motivation
In Italy, there are strong inequalities in the educational opportunities of boys and girls belonging to families with low incomes. Since the 1990s, in order to combat educational inequalities, incentive savings programmes, such as Individual Development Accounts (IDA) and Children’s Savings Accounts (CSA), have become increasingly widespread. The purpose of these programmes is to incentivise families to save through the opening of a savings account, which includes a match rate conditional on the use of the moneys for education-related expenditures. The existing evidence from evaluation studies carried out in Italy (Percorsi and WILL) suggests that these programmes have a potential to contrast educational inequality.
The project
The project contributes to building evidence on matched savings programs for education in Italy by evaluating with a mixed methods approach a program targetd to 1e0 minors between the ages of 11 and 16 living in Cuneo, Alba, Bra, and Mondovì. The intervention allows beneficiary families to invest in their children’s educational future through a customised family savings programme to support access to educational, sporting and cultural opportunities during the children’s growth. Each family benefiting from the programme will open a savings account in the name of the child into which they will pay their own resources.
Results
The research is still ongoing, and results are not available at the moment.
PUOI is a project co-financed by Impresa Sociale Con i Bambini and Fondazione CRC (Cassa Risparmio Cuneo), with the contribution of Cooperative Sociale Emmanuele.
