Introduction
Shantel Makungu, a Cohort 36 fellow from Zambia, gathered eleven students from Copperbelt University for a session that did not shy away from naming the real obstacles standing between young people and consistent saving. Rather than presenting saving as a simple matter of willpower, her KAFI Financial Literacy Leadership Fellowship community project treated it as a habit shaped by a whole web of interconnected pressures, financial discipline, budgeting, peer influence, and the everyday temptations of student life, each of which needed to be addressed directly if lasting change was going to take hold.
A Session That Named Every Pressure Point
Makungu's session covered remarkable ground for a single sitting, moving through saving, financial discipline, budgeting, setting financial goals, impulse spending, peer pressure, debt, lifestyle inflation, and preparing for emergencies. Rather than treating these as separate, disconnected topics, she wove them into a single narrative about the forces shaping a young person's financial decisions, some internal, like discipline and goal setting, and others external, like peer pressure and the gradual creep of lifestyle inflation as income grows.
Alongside this comprehensive coverage, Makungu grounded the session in practical strategy, discussing concrete ways students could begin developing consistent saving habits, including the importance of starting small and setting goals realistic enough to sustain motivation over time. This combination, naming the pressures working against saving while offering practical tools to counter them, gave the session both honesty and direction, acknowledging real difficulty while still equipping students with something actionable.
Letting Students Name Their Own Barriers
The session's interactive structure allowed students to speak candidly about their own experiences and challenges with saving, and the barriers they identified painted a clear picture of what young people at CBU are actually navigating. Limited income and high expenses formed the foundational financial pressure many students described, compounded further by unexpected expenses that can quickly derail even careful planning. Alongside these structural pressures, students pointed to more behavioral challenges, impulse buying, the influence of peer pressure on spending decisions, and the excessive use of credit as a way of bridging financial gaps that saving alone had not yet been built to cover.
By allowing these barriers to surface directly from the students themselves, rather than assuming what challenges they faced, Makungu ensured her guidance throughout the session addressed real, specific obstacles rather than a generic set of assumptions about student financial behavior.
Discipline as a Set of Daily Choices
The feedback shared by participants reflects how directly Makungu's message about financial discipline resonated. One participant described the session as genuinely eye opening, arriving at a clearer understanding that financial discipline is built through consistency, budgeting, and intentional choices made deliberately with one's money. This participant identified saving as the single biggest reminder they took from the session, a reflection that speaks to how effectively Makungu connected the broader concept of financial discipline back to the specific, concrete habit of saving consistently.
Understanding Saving as a Foundation, Not Just a Habit
A second participant offered a comprehensive summary of the many benefits saving provides, describing how it helps in emergencies, supports financial independence, enables the achievement of personal goals, develops good financial habits more broadly, encourages budgeting, and reduces financial stress overall. This reflection captures the full scope of what Makungu appeared to convey throughout the session, that saving functions not as an isolated financial task, but as a foundation supporting nearly every other aspect of sound financial management, from emotional wellbeing to long term independence.
A Guest Perspective That Added Real World Weight
A third participant highlighted a particularly memorable moment from the session's question and answer segment, describing how they learned to build financial discipline through setting priorities. This participant also referenced a guest contributor who shared her own struggles as an entrepreneur, offering insight into how a strong relationship with customers can directly support a business's growth. This addition brought a layer of real world, lived experience into the session, allowing students to hear firsthand how financial discipline and relationship building intersect within an actual small business context, rather than remaining confined to theoretical discussion alone.
This moment illustrates the value of incorporating varied voices into a financial literacy session, giving students exposure not just to structured guidance from Makungu herself, but also to the practical, sometimes messier realities of applying financial discipline within an actual entrepreneurial venture.
Setting Goals That Actually Stick
A fourth participant distilled one of the session's more practical takeaways into a clear, actionable principle, setting realistic goals worth continually returning to while saving, and keeping those savings in a place not easily accessible for casual spending. This reflection speaks to a specific, tactical dimension of saving success, recognizing that discipline alone is often insufficient without structural barriers that make impulsive withdrawal more difficult. By combining goal setting with intentional friction around accessing saved funds, this participant identified a strategy well suited to countering the impulse spending and peer pressure challenges raised earlier in the session.
A Session Shaped by Honesty About Difficulty
What distinguishes Makungu's session is its refusal to minimize the genuine difficulty many students face in building consistent saving habits. By explicitly naming barriers such as limited income, unexpected expenses, impulse buying, peer pressure, and excessive credit use, she avoided a common pitfall in financial literacy work, offering encouragement without acknowledgment of the real obstacles standing in the way. Instead, students left with guidance calibrated to their actual circumstances, informed by challenges they had voiced themselves rather than assumptions imposed from outside.
From Awareness to Action
Reflecting on the broader impact of the session, Makungu observed that practical financial literacy discussions of this kind can help young people become more aware of their financial habits, encouraging better decisions around saving, spending, and planning for the future. The range of feedback shared by participants supports this conclusion directly, spanning a renewed commitment to consistency and intentional spending, a fuller appreciation of saving's role in reducing financial stress, insight drawn from a real entrepreneur's experience, and a specific, actionable strategy for making saved money harder to casually spend.
A Leader Willing to Sit With Real Struggles
As Makungu continues her work within Cohort 36, her session at Copperbelt University stands as a clear example of how financial literacy outreach can be most effective when it treats young people's financial struggles as legitimate and specific, rather than glossing over them in favor of generic encouragement. By naming the real pressures CBU students face and pairing that honesty with practical, actionable strategies, she gave students at Copperbelt University tools genuinely suited to the financial realities of their daily lives.
Report Summary
Shantel Makungu, a Cohort 36 fellow from Zambia, conducted a financial literacy awareness session with eleven students from Copperbelt University under her KAFI Financial Literacy Leadership Fellowship community project, focused on why saving is important for young people. The session covered saving, financial discipline, budgeting, setting financial goals, impulse spending, peer pressure, debt, lifestyle inflation, and preparing for emergencies, alongside practical strategies for building consistent saving habits, including starting small and setting realistic goals. Students identified genuine barriers to saving, including limited income, high and unexpected expenses, impulse buying, peer pressure, and excessive credit use. Feedback reflected significant impact, with participants highlighting the role of consistency and intentional choices in financial discipline, the broad benefits saving provides for financial independence and reduced stress, insight gained from a guest entrepreneur's experience with customer relationships, and a practical strategy of setting realistic goals while keeping savings less accessible for casual spending. Makungu concluded that practical, honest financial literacy discussions can meaningfully increase young people's awareness of their financial habits and support better decision making around saving, spending, and planning for the future.
