Michael Gilmore is obsessed with money, but not in the way you think. The cofounder of the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards (MAIAs) is obsessed with making sure people, especially poor people, understand how to save and what it means to make solid financial decisions and “make money better”.

Ahead of the Group of 20 Bali Summit next month, and with an impending recession on the minds of many, he shares his thoughts below on money, progress (especially in Bali) and financial freedom.

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I wonder what the world's leaders will see of Bali when they arrive for the G20 in a couple of weeks' time. Some brand-new roads and excellent airport infrastructure will whisk them from their planes to the Nusa Dua resort area so quickly, they probably won't have time to see much of the “real Bali”, if there's any of that left.

In what has been a tough few years for the planet, Indonesia has done a truly impressive job. In the first nine months of the year, while the currencies of most developed countries fell more than 10 percent against the United States dollar, some by as much as 20 percent, the Indonesian rupiah lost just 6 percent. Remarkable for what has often been the most vulnerable currency in a financial crisis.

But it's also a bit of a shame. Beyond the conference area, Bali could ask bigger questions of the G20, ones that might be really useful over the longer term. For example, what happens to the world as we constantly chase growth at all costs?

This is development, no doubt, but at what cost? We all promised ourselves during the pandemic that things would change, but the new normal is beginning to feel very like the old normal, and what got us here is only going to get us more of that.

If we teach young people about money, it could lead to so many positive changes. Yes, we could help them prepare better for their own futures, understand how they’ll need to pay, save and invest for their lives, but there are bound to be a lot of other positive spillover effects into areas like sustainable development.

For example, if the world had set out to improve health and global longevity 200 years ago when average life expectancy was just 28 years old, it would probably have failed because only 15 percent of the global population could read. By teaching reading, we’ve enabled the spread of best practice in health, nutrition, medicine, and life spans have more than doubled.

That doesn’t mean we need to teach kids development economics. We should just teach them at the youngest possible age about what money is and what it can do. We can teach them all the skills they need to know to become a millionaire in their lifetime very easily.

Personal finance could be one of the simplest courses in school. They just need to save $7 [Rp 110,000] every day and invest it to get 7 percent returns, and they’ll have seven-figure wealth before they’re 70 (that’s why I write books under the pseudonym, the Seven Dollar Millionaire).

We can then let them decide if they want to become an entrepreneur or a philanthropist, but truly understand the choices and the consequences. Maybe they will choose to squander the education and not change their lives, but that’s not an excuse to not teach it. At the moment, we don’t teach any of this, so we don’t even give young people the choice. As a result, money is a source of problems and stress, not solutions.

This isn’t a conspiracy, just historical oversight, but it causes tragedies. People rack up too much debt, slip into poverty, even commit suicide. This is global and affects all income and age groups, and while talk about addressing this is finally gaining momentum, actual on-the-ground programs shifting the emphasis of schooling, putting mandatory courses in front of students, are still desperately thin on the ground.

We have to do it now, too, because it isn’t going to get any easier. Fintech is extending financial inclusion to places these services couldn’t previously reach, but a huge percentage of people being included haven’t been taught the rules of the game. OJK’s [the Financial Services Authority’s] latest data suggests half the people now included in the financial system have a huge gap between their access and understanding of how to use the services. While it’s good access is improving, access without education can accelerate misuse and bring even more serious problems.

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I guess I am if the choice is between being active and passive. Seeing things in the world that we feel are wrong and doing nothing about them is a root cause of stress and anxiety. On the other hand, we are wired as a species to enjoy agency and activity, so if I stretch the definition that far, then yes, maybe I’m an activist.

Of course, it makes sense to contribute to a subject you know something about, and for me that’s finance. It frustrates me that we know, for a 100 percent rock-solid fact, that every child going through school is going to need to know how to use money when they leave. They will need to know how to earn it, save it and invest it, and we don’t teach any of these things. Instead, from the moment they can read, write and do basic mathematics, we teach things that we guess they might need, but that most will never use again.

We set up the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards to try to accelerate solutions. More work is being done, but it’s often hard to find. Even when you find it, it is difficult to know if it is good or appropriate to use in a different situation. The MAIAs are designed to find the best work, wherever it is in the world, to help encourage it and spread it. Winners earlier this year included leading academics and influencers from as far apart as Peru and Malaysia. Our judges included Financial Times editors, academics, fintech entrepreneurs and influencers: everyone is invited.

But we got no entries from Indonesia, which was a huge disappointment. This huge archipelago has one of the world’s youngest populations who will desperately need this information if they are to continue the rapid growth the country has achieved in the past 20 years. The G20 presents an incredible opportunity for Indonesia to present the case for teaching about money, its plans to do so in the coming years, and to insist other countries start teaching financial education in schools.

I think Indonesia has something to teach the world about money. I have seen references to both [the] OJK and the Ministry of Education pushing financial literacy in schools and beyond, but there is much more to do, given the sheer talent and creativity of Indonesians.

Up past Ubud, I had a quiet chat with a batik artist, Wayan, overlooking some remaining rice fields. Wayan asked me about the global economy and what was happening in markets. While his parents and grandparents before them had watched the weather and water to know how to tend their fields, developing other crafts and skills to boost their income when times were tough, Wayan knew he needed to build a different portfolio to weather today's storms, but he had never been shown how to go about it.

Someone like Wayan, somewhere, has the answer the world's leaders need, but will need to be as financially literate as his skilled ancestors were farming literate to provide that answer. We need these skills to be taught in schools in Indonesia and across the world if we are to arrive at proper sustainable growth. The answer will come from a Wayan, not from a global summit. Our global leaders should get off the new main road to Nusa Dua and out into the real Bali if they really want to solve the G20’s problems.

Log on to maiawards.org for more information.

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