Baruipur
Bandhan-Konnagar
Where the curriculum began: two workshops with Bandhan-Konnagar, in Bengali and Hindi, with follow-up that is still running.
For the people who build the world.
Practical financial literacy in ten modules, taught in the language of the room.
A Knowing Your Money workshop · Baruipur, West Bengal
§ 01 · What this is
The Prosperity Project teaches practical money skills (bank accounts, budgeting, debt, savings, scam protection, digital payments and emergency planning) to people the financial system has historically ignored. The flagship curriculum, Knowing Your Money, is ten modules grounded in real interviews. It has been taught to women in West Bengal and Maharashtra, in person and online, by Rehaan Chowdhary with Bandhan-Konnagar, Indo Count Industries, Shristi Corp and FEED, among others, with support from Bandhan Bank Ltd.
§ 02 · Why I built it
Shampa has looked after me since I was born. It took me years to see how hard her financial life had been: a scam that took a chunk of her savings, a bank account that caused her problems she could never fully explain, constant work with very little to show for it.
So I asked if I could interview her, and we ended up talking over several weeks. Every answer pointed to the same gap: no school had taught her any of this, and no one else had either. Once I saw that gap I could not stop seeing it, because it was not hers alone.
I turned what I learned into ten modules in plain language. What held the women in that first room back was never ability; it was information they were never given. That is something we can fix.
§ 03 · The curriculum
Knowing Your Money: ten modules, built from real interviews.
The ten modules sit under three pillars: control your money, protect it, then grow it, because you cannot protect or grow what you do not yet command. Every module carries a real question worked out alongside a real person, and opens with a story about a recurring cast drawn from those first interviews.
Every student keeps the textbook in her own script. It is free to download in English, Bengali and Hindi.
A group works through a module at Indo Count's training centre, Kolhapur.
§ 04 · How a workshop runs
All ten modules, in a room the women already know, in their own language.
We work with partners who already have the room and the trust: a self-help group hall, a livelihood programme, a company's training centre. In West Bengal a cohort of fifty or more women works through the ten modules of Knowing Your Money together, then follow-up sessions, several over video call, return to whatever each woman still needs, with her progress tracked along the way. In Kolhapur, groups took all ten modules in a single condensed sitting at their workplace. Sessions run in the language of the room: Bengali, Hindi or Marathi.
A methodThe CRP Model
Students complete the curriculum themselves, then return as facilitators, so the work travels in a familiar voice and stays after the founder leaves the room.
§ 05 · Where it runs
Four rooms, two states, and the same ten modules.
Kolhapur
Indo Count Industries
Around two hundred women at the Indo Count Industries mill, taught in Marathi, a group at a time.
Asansol · Shristi Corp
Online into Asansol with Shristi Corp, the developer behind the Shristinagar township.
Asansol · FEED
Online into Asansol with FEED, a grassroots nonprofit for first-generation learners and women.
Completion, accounts opened, and facilitators trained are being compiled for the first annual report.
In the press
“Lessons in financial literacy for 200 women in Kolhapur, from Rehaan Chowdhary's The Prosperity Project”
रेहान चौधरी यांच्या द प्रॉस्पेरिटी प्रोजेक्टतर्फे कोल्हापुरातील 200 महिलांना आर्थिक साक्षरतेचे धडे
On the workshops at Indo Count: what the sessions covered, from household budgets to an emergency fund, and how the curriculum reached Kolhapur from Baruipur and Asansol.
§ 06 · Stories from the cohort
“People have to be able to face a financial situation. They have to have money of their own.”
মানুষকে আর্থিক পরিস্থিতির মোকাবেলা করতে হবে, তাদের কাছে টাকা থাকতে হবে।
Shankari Purkait Mondal · Community Resource Person, Baruipur · spoken in Bengali
§ 07 · Gallery
The classrooms, the materials, the people in the room.
