Malawi
Introduction
Thomson Kaunda, a Cohort 38 fellow from Malawi, did not start his KAFI community project by teaching. He started by asking questions. Before introducing a single new concept, he wanted to know what his community already understood about budgeting, saving, and investing, the three pillars of his project's theme, Personal Finance: Visionary Life and Future Financial Freedom. What he uncovered reshaped how he approached everything that followed.
Testing Knowledge Before Adding to It
Kaunda's decision to begin with inquiry rather than instruction reflects a thoughtful, diagnostic approach to community outreach. Rather than assuming his audience needed the basics explained from scratch, he first assessed their existing understanding of budgeting, saving, and investing, along with their sense of why each of these practices actually matters. This starting point allowed him to calibrate his entire session around the community's real starting position, rather than guessing at what they might or might not already know.
What he found was revealing. Most people he spoke with demonstrated a basic, functional knowledge of these financial terms. They could explain what budgeting, saving, and investing actually mean, and they understood, at least conceptually, why each one holds value. This was not a community lacking financial vocabulary or awareness. The gap Kaunda uncovered lay somewhere else entirely.
Knowing the Theory, Skipping the Practice
Despite this conceptual understanding, Kaunda found that most people simply did not practice what they could so clearly describe. This distinction, between knowing a financial principle and actually living by it, emerged as the central finding of his diagnostic conversations, and it reframed the entire purpose of his outreach. His community did not primarily need more financial education in the abstract. They needed help closing the gap between knowledge and behavior.
This insight carries real significance for how financial literacy work should be approached more broadly. A community that already understands why budgeting matters, but still does not budget, faces a fundamentally different challenge than a community encountering the concept for the very first time. Addressing the first situation effectively requires understanding not what people don't know, but what stands between their knowledge and their action.
Budgeting Only for the Next Few Minutes
Kaunda's exploration of budgeting habits specifically revealed a particular pattern worth examining closely. Most people were capable of short term budgeting, planning, for instance, exactly how much to spend on tomatoes, relish, and other items during a single trip to the market. This kind of immediate, transactional budgeting came naturally and was clearly already well practiced within the community.
What was missing was budgeting on a longer timeline, planning before money was even earned, or immediately after it arrived, rather than only in the moment of spending it. This distinction matters considerably. A person who budgets only at the point of purchase is reacting to spending decisions one at a time, rather than working from an overarching plan that accounts for total income, competing priorities, and longer term goals. Kaunda's community had mastered the smaller, more immediate version of budgeting, while the broader, more structural practice, the kind capable of shaping financial outcomes over weeks and months rather than single transactions, remained largely absent.
Saving Without a Destination
A similar pattern emerged around saving. Kaunda found that most people in his community simply did not save at all. Among those who did, the saving tended to be short lived, with money set aside quickly finding its way back into spending within a relatively brief period. Rather than building toward something specific and sustained, saving functioned as a short term holding pattern, money set aside for the immediate future rather than genuinely accumulated toward any longer term goal.
This finding points to an absence not of the saving impulse itself, since people clearly were capable of setting money aside at least temporarily, but of a longer term financial vision guiding that behavior. Saving without a clear destination, without a specific goal pulling that money forward toward something meaningful months or years down the line, tends to remain fragile, easily interrupted by whatever spending pressure arises next. Kaunda's community appeared to be saving reactively, in short bursts, rather than saving with intention toward a defined future outcome.
Why This Diagnosis Matters More Than a Lecture Would Have
What makes Kaunda's approach particularly valuable is what this diagnostic groundwork makes possible for his future work. Having identified precisely where the gap lies, not in conceptual understanding, but in the translation of that understanding into consistent, longer term financial behavior, he is now positioned to design guidance that addresses the actual barrier his community faces, rather than repeating information they already largely possess.
A session built around simply explaining what budgeting and saving mean would have offered little new value to a community that could already define these terms clearly. Kaunda's inquiry revealed that the real opportunity lies elsewhere, in helping people extend their already functional short term budgeting instincts into a broader, more structural practice, and in helping short term savers develop the longer term vision needed to sustain their saving habits over time rather than watching them dissolve within weeks.
A Model for Starting Outreach the Right Way
What distinguishes Kaunda's approach as a Community Finance Leader is his discipline in resisting the urge to teach before he had genuinely listened. It would have been easy to walk into his community project already assuming what people needed to hear, delivering a standard explanation of budgeting, saving, and investing regardless of what his audience already understood. Instead, he took the time to ask, to listen, and to let the community's actual gaps, rather than his own assumptions, shape the direction of his work.
This diagnostic first approach offers a valuable model for other community finance leaders as well, demonstrating that effective outreach often depends less on how much information a facilitator can deliver, and more on how precisely that information is targeted toward the specific barrier a community is actually facing. As Kaunda continues his work within Cohort 38, this initial assessment stands as a clear example of how understanding a community's real starting point, rather than assuming it, can shape financial literacy work that genuinely addresses the gap between what people know and what they actually do.
Report Summary
Thomson Kaunda, a Cohort 38 fellow from Malawi, began his KAFI community project under the theme Personal Finance: Visionary Life and Future Financial Freedom by first assessing his community's existing understanding of budgeting, saving, and investing before introducing new content. He found that most participants already possessed a basic, functional knowledge of these concepts and understood their general importance, but did not consistently practice them. Specifically, most people were capable of short term, transactional budgeting, such as planning market purchases, but did not budget on a longer timeline before or immediately after earning income. Similarly, while some participants did save, that saving tended to be short lived and reactive, spent again within a short period rather than sustained toward any defined long term goal. Kaunda's diagnostic approach revealed that the community's central challenge was not a lack of financial knowledge, but a gap between that knowledge and consistent, longer term financial behavior, positioning his future outreach to address that specific gap directly rather than repeating information participants already understood.
