As part of efforts to expose the younger generation to the world of finance, savings, and investment, Cordros Asset Management Limited, has held its third edition of children’s financial investment debate, on ‘Every Child a Milestone Debate competition’.

Lagoon Secondary School and Grace High School Gbagada locked horns in a heated debate on the topic, ‘Short-term or Long-term investment, which is more effective in building wealth?’

Lagoon Secondary School won the debate with 77.4 per cent, winning a prize of N100,000, which will be invested in the mutual milestone seed fund for the contestants, while Grace Secondary School scored 62.5 per cent.

Speaking on this development at the weekend in Lagos, the Managing Director of Cordros Asset Management, Gbolahan Aina, disclosed that the event was to promote financial literacy among the youths, noting that financial literacy among adults is about 38 per cent in Nigeria, which means a lot of people don’t know simple things like budgeting and how to go about investment.

“As an organisation, we decided to start teaching children about financial literacy through this initiative and what we can do is to teach them about financial principles and also have them compete with each other. The two schools talked about short-term and long-term investment and to be honest, it was very interesting and both schools did excellently well,” Aina said.

Speaking on the theme for this year’s edition, ‘Invest in Your Future’, he said: “I think all parents, should start teaching their children about investment as early as possible, and that’s why one of the things we learned today is about compounding your interest if you can teach a child how to compound interest early, the child will appreciate that later in life.

“It is one thing to teach a person how to invest, it’s easier when you give seed or capital to invest and that is what we want to achieve by providing seed funds to the winners of this contest.”

A staff of the company, Ikechukwu Osuchukwu who took participants on a journey of how to invest, disclosed that, while going into investment, a potential investor is supposed to be knowledgeable, so that an investor will be able to measure the risk involved in the kind of investment he or she is going into.

According to him, a potential investor should be careful with investment that promises a mouth-watering return on investment, advising that, the trend that is not driven by knowledge could be dangerous, stating that, a potential investor should understand time horizon, whether he or she is going into short or longterm investment.

He also said starting early is very important because that guarantees high return on investment, adding that, potential investors must be strategic, reduce cost, plan well, should not put their eggs in one basket, avoid people who create panic, avoid overconfidence and lack of information among other factors that could make investment not to be successful.

Speaking on what she learned, a debators, Shobagmi Oluwateniola from Grace High Schools, said she learned a lot about financial literacy especially on why it’s important to start early, adding that, she will prefer to go for a longterm investment.

On her part, Olaoluwa Fashebemi, a co debator from Lagoon Secondary School, said she had an amazing experience, noting that, they actually came for a debate competition not knowing that, they will be exposed to a fullblown lecture on financial literacy.