Impacts of Financial Inclusion on Youth Development: Findings from the Ghana YouthSave experiment

The Ghana Experiment in YouthSave is a large-scale, rigorous test of the impacts of youth savings accounts (YSAs) on savings performance and developmental outcomes for youth and their households.

The Center for Social Development (CSD), in partnership with researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana, implemented the project, one of the largest social research experiments of any kind in the developing world. Because of the rigor and long-term nature of the research design, the Ghana Experiment has the potential to offer the strongest evidence in the developing world for or against the expansion of YSAs and their viability as a development tool. The findings of the experiment suggest directions in products, services, and policy.