What Would It Take for Financial Education to Lead to Lasting Financial Health?

Marisa is 32 and lives in Pesaro, a small city in central Italy. She has worked continuously since finishing university: first short-term contracts, then freelance projects, and later a series of temporary jobs in the service sector. She manages her daily expenses carefully and considers herself responsible with money. Yet she has not accumulated a single day of pension contributions.

This is not because Marisa ignored the issue. She understands that saving early matters. But like many young adults navigating uncertain careers and daily financial pressures, she finds it difficult to prioritize long-term decisions over immediate needs. Rent, bills, work instability and everyday expenses inevitably take precedence. And no one has guided her through the options available or helped translate abstract advice about “saving for the future” into practical steps she could take.

Marisa’s situation reflects a broader structural problem: financial education often delivers information, but not the systems and opportunities people need to act on it. 

Connecting financial education with long-lasting financial health

So, what would it take for financial education to actually lead to lasting financial health?  

Achieving financial health – defined as the ability to manage day-to-day obligations, absorb shocks and build long-term security – depends on two forces working together: 

1. People’s knowledge, habits and confidence, which can be improved through financial education. 
2. The systems they interact with –  including financial services, payment infrastructure and welfare programs – which lie beyond the scope of financial education alone.

When these two elements align, financial education can translate into financial health. But when they don’t, even well-informed individuals, like Marisa, may struggle to put that knowledge into practice. 

As we celebrate Global Money Week 2026 – a worldwide campaign to support financial literacy for young people – we wanted to share our experience in Italy with an initiative designed to bring these two elements into alignment.

The challenges for university students in Italy

The Uwelfare project, implemented by the Italian philanthropic entity Fast Forward Foundation, explores how welfare systems can support financial health earlier in life. 

In Italy, only 40% of young people feel financially literate. Among those under 24, 65% consider joining a pension fund premature. Beyond low awareness, for many young adults such as Marisa, the system offers no meaningful entry point during the years when saving habits are easiest to establish. The consequences appear later: today more than half of pensions paid in Italy fall below $860 per month, a very modest amount by Italian standards, while younger cohorts have experienced prolonged wage stagnation. Delaying saving has long-lasting disadvantages: postponing participation significantly reduces the likelihood of building adequate retirement protection.

At Uwelfare, we focus on university students who are beginning to manage money independently but often remain outside the reach of traditional financial capability and social protection systems.

This mismatch reflects two structural gaps common across many countries:

1.  A habit gap: financial education and financial services frequently reach people too late, after financial behaviors and attitudes toward money have already been established.
2.  A delivery gap: welfare systems are typically designed to engage individuals only once they are already embedded in formal employment and social protection schemes. 

In reality, people’s first encounters with financial decision-making often occur during periods of transition, such as students leaving home for university. Their attention is naturally focused on immediate pressures such as housing, studies, work and daily expenses. Long-term financial risks, including retirement security, appear distant. Yet this stage of life is precisely when saving behaviors and financial habits are established.

An integrated model combining education and access

Uwelfare addresses this challenge through an integrated model that combines three key elements within a welfare-oriented framework:

1. Problem statement and diagnostic. The project first explores how university students perceive financial security and which communication approaches resonate with them. This research helps identify narratives and channels that can make complex concepts understandable and relevant.
2. Education and awareness-raising. We use digital outreach to raise awareness among students about pension savings, testing different communication approaches to identify the most effective ones for the target audience. In addition, free seminars held in university residences in Turin, Bari and Rome use practical scenarios to explain how pensions, savings and long-term financial resilience interact across a person’s life. The goal is practical, not theoretical. We aim to help students see how decisions made in their twenties affect outcomes decades later.
3. Access and incentives. Through a partnership with an open pension fund, the initiative enables students to enroll in a pension fund without entry or management fees. To reinforce behavioral change, the project includes matched contributions for students who begin saving. Additional bonuses are linked to educational participation, volunteering activities and documented hardship. The maximum contribution of $57 per month is meaningful within a student budget and helps make the habit of saving tangible.

The design logic is behavioral as much as financial. When knowledge is paired with an immediate opportunity to act and a modest incentive to begin, financial habits become easier to establish and maintain.  

An impact assessment dashboard will analyze students’ savings behaviors over time, providing preliminary insights into the continuity of contributions and the durability of new habits. These data will help us assess whether early engagement translates into lasting financial well-being.

Earlier entry points to build long-term security

Global evidence on financial education shows that financial education alone cannot close the gap between knowledge and action. And a pension payment or other social transfer offers little protection if it arrives late or is offered at the wrong stage of life. But when education is embedded in social payment systems as a design feature and delivered at the right moments in people’s lives, then the potential for impact is great.  

Earlier entry points are key to making sure that people like Marisa can reach their thirties without being structurally excluded from building long-term security. With the right design combining education and easy access, welfare policies can achieve real financial and social protection.