Reports Database:
Social Impact Assessment of ANBIMA’s “How to Invest in You” Program

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In order to measure the effectiveness of the actions of ANBIMA’s financial education program How to Invest in You for university students, an evaluation work was carried out following the assumptions of the SROI (Social Return on Investment) protocol.

Scope and time frame: This SROI assessment covers the period 2018 to the first half of 2023. Regarding the time scope, in mutual agreement with the Anbima team, the year 2018 was chosen as the initial year because it was the date of the last structural modification of the course, and the first semester of 2023 as the end year in view of the most recent period of the program when, at the time, the focus groups were held and surveys were applied.

In general terms, the SROI protocol is characterized as a non-experimental and ex-post impact assessment. In other words, an evaluation that seeks to understand possible changes in people’s lives, comparing before and after, through the beneficiary’s own perception after they have undergone the intervention.

The construction of the Theory of Change for the How to Invest in You program, based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with direct and indirect beneficiaries (college students and universities) and ANBIMA’s technical team, help us to map all the stakeholders involved and also brought us a portrait of the program from which a clear and logical correlation is established between the actions carried out (training trails), the changes potentially generated in the lives of its beneficiaries, and its more general and strategic objective. It was still during this phase, through the triangulation of information between the program’s monitoring reports and conducted interviews, that IDIS was able to define the evaluative scope, deciding which stakeholders would be included and which excluded from the measurement and valuation of social impact.

Subsequently, 10 direct beneficiaries (college students) of the program were consulted through focus groups and in-depth interviews. This stage allowed us to define the evaluative variables that make up each of the changes perceived in the lives of the college students. In turn, the definition of the evaluative variables paved the way for the next stage in which the intensity with which change happens in people’s lives was measured and the delimitation of a percentage of counterfactual (whichever changes are due to external factors and other social actors) was measured.

Finally, once each of the evaluative variables had been defined and measured, monetary values were assigned to them through the adoption of financial proxies. The total social impact generated, monetized, is compared with the amount invested in the program, which allows us to arrive at a monetary ratio that indicates whether the social return of the program is positive or not. In the case of the financial education program How to Invest in You, we arrived at an SROI index of 2.14, which, in other words, indicates that the investment made more than doubles in the form of social benefits, or even that in order to achieve social benefits similar to those that the program achieves, a given individual would have to invest a little more than twice what the program costs for each direct beneficiary.

It is worth emphasizing that what makes up the SROI index presented is a set of three axes of change, all belonging to the same causality chain, where specific knowledge about finances is first acquired, which in turn leads to greater financial autonomy and unfolds in developed socio-emotional aspects, totally intertwined with financial autonomy. As an example, the college student feels more relaxed about his future when he starts to organize himself better financially.

Segmented analyses (gender, race/ethnicity, age, etc.) showed limited variation (most under 10 p.p.) and, given sample representativeness constraints, were used for interpretation rather than stratified valuation.

In general terms, the evaluation process evidences ANBIMA’s assertive strategy regarding the program’s gain in scale. The online platform, with a user-friendly language and format and, therefore, democratic; the incentives and counterparts offered to participants, such as CPA-10 certification and equivalence for complementary hours of the university, are strategies that favor reaching a large number of beneficiaries in the face of a relatively low investment.

The recommendations we have reached in order to maximize the social impact generated go in two complementary directions: to further enhance the gain in scale and to increase the individual impact perceived by the beneficiary.

• With an emphasis on reinforcing the strategy of gaining scale, it is recommended to expand access to the course for non-university students, and/or family members and friends of university students.
• In order to increase the individual NPV of impact, it is recommended to create and foster spaces for interaction between users on the platform.
• From the perspective of both maximizing individual impact and gaining scale, a strategy of focusing on audiences with greater socio-economic vulnerability and, consequently, a lower potential counterfactual discount is recommended. This leads us to a possible review of the range of partnerships, expanding them to public universities, technical courses, federal institutes and formal basic education teaching units.