Airfox enables 100 São Paulo students to have professional education classes
The idea behind “Mo Money Mo Problems”, the Notorious BIG song released in 1997 shortly after his death and that reached No1 in the United States, is arguably flawed. After all, money can actually help solve some problems, and more money therefore can solve more problems. It’s simple logic.
To help increase the problem solving abilities of 100 students from Technical School Martin Luther King, in the São Paulo neighborhood of Tatuapé, the most inhabited city in Brazil, Airfox teamed up with NGO Junior Achievement to provide an intensive one day workshop focusing on financial education.
Five classes of 20 students had lessons with 10 Junior Achievement instructors — two per class — on how to develop habits that generate a healthy financial life, making money last longer and also how to properly invest it and make it grow. Concepts like creating a personal budget to help keep track of bank accounts were also on the menu. The action took place in December in Latin America’s largest metropolis. A similar event happened in a school in Rio de Janeiro with another 100 students.
Junior Achievement, which aims to prepare young people for the job market and teach financial education as well as entrepreneurship, took its own books to the students, teaching budgets and personal balance sheets, savings, investments, loans and life strategies. Terms such as compound interest, inflation, assets and liabilities, risk and return, credit and penalties, stocks and net worth were all topics explained to those taking part.
The courses are sponsored by Airfox with the prize won at the CODE_n Contest in Stuttgart, Germany. The startup competition had 300 participants from 42 countries and Airfox, the Boston-based fintech company founded by a young Brazilian entrepreneur based in the United States, won the awards for Best Startup and Best Business Model.
Quotes from students who took the course
“I learned the importance of investments in order to build a successful future. This class was very productive and addressed several interesting subjects that we should take note of, increasing the desire to undertake and invest.
Thomas Lee Caniloi
The course was extremely interesting and will certainly be useful not only in my professional life, but also in my professional one. The teachers were friendly and dynamic, giving us the freedom to participate effectively in the class, making it less “dull” than ordinary classes”
Ana Carolina N. dos Santos
This course day was very good and very important for me to realize how much money I spend. Now I know I need to save more of my money, and something that will help me in this is the ‘52-week challenge’. It was very good for me. Thank you very much!
Pedro Mendes Sant’Anna
This class was very good because we discovered new things related to investments and money management, which can be very useful in the future, besides reaffirming already known and learned themes, demonstrating an excellent work of Junior Achievement.
Matheus B. Parente
I liked it a lot, I had already learned some things, but some of the concepts they taught me I didn’t know. I think it will be very useful for my future. The teachers are very friendly and respectful.
Heloísa Stockmann Torres
I learned the importance of creating a personal budget, which I needed. I thought the class was very productive and very good for the incentive to plan for the future always with security and financial stability.
Vitória Luiza Diógenes Saldanha
Although I already knew everything, or almost everything, what interested me the most was the budget part, because it is something that has immense worth for a comfortable private life, outside of some professional business. The financial part doesn’t attract me, but the cases applied in real life, day by day, make this part much easier.
Tamiris de Figueiredo
About Airfox
Airfox develops inclusive financial services for emerging markets. To break down financial barriers and provide opportunities to build wealth, Airfox aims to create an entirely new financial services model that serves the underbanked with reliable, egalitarian, and democratic access to capital and financial services. To power its revolutionary peer-to-peer microloans program, Airfox developed and released its own cryptocurrency, AirToken (symbol: AIR), an ERC-20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain. Airfox has offices in Boston and São Paulo. To learn more about the future of decentralized digital banking:
