Financial literacy programs are popular, despite limited evidence that they lead to significant changes in savings behavior. We experimentally test the impact of financial literacy training on clients of a branchless banking program that offers doorstep access to banking to low income households. The intervention had significant impacts: total savings in the treatment group increased by 49% ($39) within a period of one year. The increase in savings is due in part to decreases in expenditures on temptation goods. These results suggest that financial education interventions can be successful in changing savings outcomes, though we are only able to speculate why the program worked in this context. 1 Acknowledgements: We thank FINO PayTech for implementing this program and Prakash Lal of FINO PayTech for his support. For comments, we thank Shawn Cole, Bilal Zia, William Jack, Sigfried Zottel, Toby Linden, and numerous conference and seminar participants, as well as two anonymous referees. For funding, we are grateful to the World Bank Russia Financial Literacy and Education Trust Fund. Calderone received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreements n. 263905 and n. 609402 (T2M). Finally, Mudita Tiwari, Anup Roy, and Sitaram Mukherjee provided excellent research assistance through CMF, IFMR Research. All opinions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of FINO PayTech or the World Bank.

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This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on 'Gender and development'.

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