Established in 2009, Be Better Education has been recognised as one of the largest private non-profit organisations dedicated to financial literacy education in China. They provide educational services to schools, universities, and district education bureaus, as well as educational consulting on teacher training, school management, student performance, and curriculum development. The organisation has been implementing the Aflatoun curricula since 2009.

Be Better applies different programmes to different age groups, in order to meet their core requirements. They gradually completed localisation of the curriculum and have made a lot of revisions to the original Aflatoun materials (called Afutong in Chinese) according to national education context. Based on the core needs of the students at different stages and age, they have systematically classified the contents and the goals of the curriculum through a child-centred active-learning method. 

Be Better Education has been implementing the Aflatoun curriculum because of several reasons, a staff member share with us. “Firstly, it is implemented by many global partners and it has a international evaluative criteria. Secondly, partnering with Aflatoun for us is a great endorsement, because it is a renowned international platform with related certificates of the United Nations. Thirdly, Aflatoun team is open, friendly and cooperative. They are always supportive to all of their partners.” 

The types of activities performed with students include variety of methods such as board games, society activities, short videos, camps, online and offline courses. Meanwhile, during this process, school teachers, volunteers, social workers and youth leaders are empowered to jointly implement the projects. Until 2019, BeBetter had provided financial literacy education to over 5.68 million children and young people from 255 districts and 30 provinces. 

BeBetter Education has established cooperation with 537 rural schools to carry out a series of financial literacy education services, such as remote online education services for rural children and offline campus activities. They also carried out online and offline teacher growth training to help rural teachers grow. These are some of the stories they shared with us.  

“I was afraid to communicate with others before I start using the Aflatoun curriculum. Since I took Aflatoun financial literacy online curriculum, I have changed a lot. I am not afraid anymore. The lesson “The Farmer’s Treasure Cave” taught us that everyone hides money in different places and in different amounts. It makes me realise that there is more than one answer to one question. 

— Huang Haihang, a student in Jiangxi Province, China 

Xiaojun is one of my students. He used to spend his pocket money very quickly without having a plan how to use it and save it at all. Once during an Aflatoun lesson, students were asked to keep track of their spendings for a week. Xiaojun suddenly discovered that most of his pocket money was spent on snacks. This lesson impressed him so much as until then he only focused on spending, but never looked back to see what his money was spent for. Later on, I asked the students to work on a pocket money plan for the following week. This time Xiaojun followed his plan and marked every expenditure. When the amount for snacks was used up, he would restrain himself of buying any more snacks. A week later, he saved 4 yuan! He was so excited. He has never saved any money before. Then, he set another saving goal – for a new school bag. Professionally, I felt appreciated that the Aflatoun curriculum could influence students in such a good way.

— A teacher in Yunnan Province, China