Rehaan Chowdhary, a 17-year-old student at Nord Anglia International School Dubai, has built a financial education initiative that has reached 420 women across West Bengal and Maharashtra since its founding in 2025. Through The Prosperity Project, Chowdhary has delivered workshops on budgeting, savings, borrowing, digital payments, and financial fraud — practical skills that remain out of reach for millions of women in India's semi-urban and rural communities.

The Personal Spark Behind the Project

The initiative traces its origins to a conversation closer to home. Learning about financial fraud that had affected the family of Shampa, who has cared for Chowdhary since birth, prompted him to consider how greater financial awareness could help people protect their savings. An existing interest in finance that had focused on his own learning gradually shifted into a structured effort to make that knowledge accessible to others.

The result was Knowing Your Money, a ten-module curriculum and accompanying textbook that explains financial concepts through familiar, everyday situations. The material covers household budgeting, wages, savings instruments, borrowing terms, investment basics, digital payment safety, fraud recognition, and emergency planning.

How the Workshops Reach Communities

The programme launched with sessions in Baruipur, West Bengal, in collaboration with Bandhan-Konnagar and with support from Bandhan Bank. It subsequently expanded to Asansol through Bengal Shristi Infrastructure Development Limited and FEED. A workplace deployment at Indo Count in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, brought workshops to 200 women employed there.

According to figures provided by The Prosperity Project, the 420 direct learners are distributed across four collaborations: 40 through Bandhan-Konnagar, 70 through Bengal Shristi Infrastructure Development Limited, 110 through FEED, and 200 through Indo Count. Sessions are conducted in Hindi and English, with local teams providing language support; at Indo Count, local facilitators enabled Marathi translation.

The Community Resource Person Model

A defining feature of the initiative is its Community Resource Person (CRP) model, designed to extend learning well beyond individual workshops. Chowdhary has trained 40 CRPs through the Bandhan and Bengal Shristi collaborations, equipping them to carry the curriculum forward in their own networks. The CRPs are counted within the 420 direct learners; people they subsequently teach are not included in that total.

The project has also developed teaching videos, multilingual resources, and a dedicated website so that participants and facilitators can revisit the material at any time. Before-and-after assessments are used to gauge comprehension and identify concepts requiring reinforcement, supported by a data management system Chowdhary built to score responses and track outcomes. An impact report is currently being finalised and will be published on the project's website.

What the Project Addresses — and What Comes Next

'I wanted to make financial education practical and relevant to the decisions people face in their everyday lives. It is not just about knowing how money works, but about being able to ask the right questions, understand the risks involved and make informed decisions about your own money,' Chowdhary said.

This comes amid a broader recognition that financial inclusion in India is a two-part challenge: access to banking and payment infrastructure is expanding, but the knowledge needed to use those tools wisely — and to avoid fraud — lags behind. The Prosperity Project's community-based approach attempts to close that gap at the grassroots level.

The initiative plans to expand through additional community organisations and employers, with a focus on locally relevant teaching, facilitator preparation, and follow-up learning. The longer-term goal is to enable organisations working with women to adopt the resources independently and sustain financial education within their own communities and workplaces.