Now is a good time to talk about money. Inflation and interest rates are squeezing wallets around the world, and global economic growth is expected to slow down to 2.9% in 2024, well below its historical average of 3.8%, according to the International Monetary Fund’s October 2023 World Economic Outlook.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense that parents are keen to teach financial literacy to their children. In a recent poll, Kansas-based research company KidSay found that only 16% of parents with two- to four-year-olds felt the topic was irrelevant to their kids— and this figure dropped to just 6% among parents of five- to seven-year-olds.

Furthermore, parents want their kids to understand money better than they do. In the US, the average adult can only correctly answer around 50% of basic questions about investing, earning and saving money, according to last year’s TIAA Institute- GFLEC Personal Finance Index report.

Despite all this, financial literacy still isn’t taught in most elementary and high schools around the world, and most content on the subject skews teen or older. Seeing this gap as a niche infotainment opportunity on the rise, several producers and broadcasters/ streamers are experimenting with the subject—and getting results.

A modern take on making cents

CBC Kids’ rebooted Street Cents series uses TikTok and YouTube to teach teens about money matters.

When it comes to making financial literacy content for children, Canadian pubcaster CBC Kids has one of the industry’s longest legacies. Its original Street Cents series, which featured a group of teen hosts sharing fun facts and journalistic reports about money, launched in 1989 and ran for almost two decades. In that time, it won several Gemini Awards, a Japan Prize and an International Emmy.

Modern kid life has changed a lot since the first show ended in 2006. Besides the advent of smartphones, social media and financial revelations such as Bitcoin, many kids and teens started to experience financial struggles firsthand in their family lives as the economic climate became more challenging during the pandemic.

CBC Kids started to see a real need again in 2021 to engage teens about money matters, says Drew Mullin, the channel’s executive in charge of production. And it already had a tried-and-tested format in the vault with Street Cents.

CBC Kids rebooted the concept in February 2022 as a digital-first format to reach teens on TikTok. In this new version, hosts make short videos tackling everything from careers, to meal planning, to buying great gifts on a budget. The series posts daily one-minute videos on TikTok, and then repurposes them as YouTube Shorts each week. Collectively, these videos have generated more than 200 million views to date on both platforms.

The key to delivering this content in a relatable way lies in taking a creative approach to touching on topics, says Amrita Singh, senior producer for the CBC Kids digital team. Instead of simply listing ways to save money, a Street Cents TikTok might show a teen trying to buy a $5 lunch. And in another example, rather than a talking head explaining what an RESP is, these facts could be woven into a conversational skit between younger and older siblings.

Early education

Taking aim at a younger target demo of five- to eight-year-olds, a new Italian series called Pipo, Pepa & Pop (pictured at top, 26 x seven minutes) debuted in December on linear channel Rai Yoyo and the RaiPlay streaming platform. And director of Rai Ragazzi Luca Milano says it’s currently one of the most successful titles on Yoyo.

The 2D-animated series centers around two siblings, their dog and a Scottish elf (inspired by none other than economist Adam Smith) who discover things like how ATMs work, why some stickers have greater value than others, the economics of buying a new backpack, and how to save money at Christmas by making DIY gifts.

Fiorella and Maria Elena Congedo (Trulli Tales) created this comedy-driven educational concept after noting a total lack of this kind of programming in the market. Financial literacy content for youth audiences has historically catered to teens, who are starting to earn (and spend) their own money from part-time jobs. But younger kids are often left in the dark about money basics.

Pipo, Pepa & Pop is produced by Fiorella and Maria Elena’s aptly named Congedo Sisters studio (a division of the publishing company Congedo Editore). To structure its episodes around age-appropriate lessons in financial literacy, the producers worked with The Financial Times’ Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign (FT FLIC), a nonprofit org that provides free information to consumers. For this age group, FT FLIC recommended familiar, relatable topics that kids could easily grasp, like getting a first allowance, saving money and learning about foreign currencies.

Rai has already renewed the series for a second season, which the Congedo sisters are currently developing. They plan to send it into production in 2024 and start working on worldwide distribution.

“Pipo, Pepa & Pop is not just about economics and finance,” notes Fiorella. “It’s a way to teach values to kids—to encourage them to plan their futures, to have goals, and to work hard to become who they want to be.”

A new stream

Attorney and business writer Garrett Sutton has just launched a new streaming app called Sunn Stream in response to a global demand he saw while travelling the world on book tours. Sutton has 11 published titles about finance under his belt so far, including Start Your Own Corporation in entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad book series. Everywhere he went to promote his books, he says parents and kids wanted to learn more about managing money.

Sunn Stream, which only started operating in December, is currently available in the US and South America on mobile devices, smart TVs and online. Sutton is focused on creating and acquiring more kids content with financial literacy themes to build up a unique and substantial offering. (Pitches should be directed to VP of production Cy Armstrong at carmstrong@sunnstream.com).

At launch, Sunn Stream boasted a catalogue of around 500 movies and 50 TV shows, including live-action originals such as The History of Money for Kids (13 x five minutes) and The US Constitution for Kids (15 x five minutes), both from 10th Legion Pictures in North Carolina. The streamer also recently picked up a 2D-animated series called Financial Literacy from UK’s Makematic.

But focusing on this kind of content alone is a hard sell with families—especially with so many new players entering the OTT market right now. So Sutton has padded the streamer’s offering with music documentaries, comedy films, Epic Story Media’s animated series Luna, Chip & Inkie and even an original live-action film called Kangaroo Kids that premiered exclusively on Sunn Stream at the end of December.

The next phase of this plan is to keep building the app’s library of financial literacy programming and dub it into Spanish in order to reach the large audience of Spanish-speaking families in the US and abroad.

It’s early days still, and it remains to be seen if Sunn Stream’s niche approach will work. But there are signs of a market opportunity for this type of content, with parents predisposed to put it in front of their kids, buyers willing to spend real money on it, and not that much supply in the chain.

This story origianlly appeared in Kidscreen’s February/March 2024 magazine issue.