Session: From Digital Access to Social Impact: Advancing Financial Capability and Equity across Global Contexts (Society for Social Work and Research 31st Annual Conference)

This symposium brings together four complementary studies from Asia, Africa, and Europe, offering a global and interdisciplinary perspective on the role of household finance in shaping family well-being and social equity. Across diverse contexts, the session highlights how financial capability, access to financial services, and broader structural forces interact to influence life outcomes. By integrating evidence from China, Taiwan, Mozambique, and Finland, the symposium underscores the importance of examining financial behavior and interventions within varying socioeconomic, technological, and institutional environments.

The unifying theme is that household finance is a critical determinant of well-being, yet shaped by different forces across global contexts. The first paper examines how AI literacy reshapes household financial decision-making in China, introducing the concept of "computational agency" — individuals' capacity to engage with digital tools to navigate financial markets. While AI literacy enhances financial engagement, its benefits are unevenly distributed, constrained by existing inequalities in income, education, and debt. The second paper shifts focus to structural and relational conditions shaping savings behavior in Taiwan's Child Development Account program. Using administrative data from 22,800 accounts over five years, the study demonstrates that savings outcomes are shaped by geographic inequality, family support structure, and institutional design, rather than individual choice alone, and that differentiated social work support strategies are essential to translate account ownership into meaningful savings for the most disadvantaged families. The third paper, situated in rural Mozambique, examines how community-based financial capability interventions, specifically Village Savings and Loan Groups, affect women's quality of life. Findings demonstrate that participation significantly improves well-being through multiple pathways, including increased household assets, better health outcomes, and reduced hunger, highlighting the importance of locally grounded, community-driven financial interventions in addressing multidimensional poverty and advancing gender equity. The fourth paper from Finland addresses the need for rigorous and ethically grounded evaluation of financial social work interventions. It proposes a global evaluation framework grounded in core social work values (dignity, equity, and harm reduction) and demonstrates its application through a pilot randomized controlled trial, showing how systematic evaluation strengthens intervention design, implementation, and policy translation.

Together, these four studies present a coherent and progressive narrative: technological change is reshaping financial behavior, structural conditions determine who benefits from financial policies, policies and community-driven services directly improve well-being, and robust evaluation frameworks are essential to ensure interventions serve marginalized populations effectively.

Methodologically, the symposium demonstrates diverse and complementary approaches. The China study employs large-scale nationally representative survey data. The Taiwan study uses longitudinal administrative data with principal component analysis. The Mozambique study applies a quasi-experimental design to assess real-world intervention impacts. The Finland study combines a randomized controlled trial with process evaluation to generate high-quality implementation evidence.

Together, this symposium advances a global, evidence-based understanding of financial capability as a key pathway to reducing inequality and promoting sustainable well-being across diverse national contexts.