Over the past decade a range of development actors have begun to implement financial literacy training in low‐income countries. These programmes have become a key pillar of financial inclusion projects targeting the rural poor but, to date, they have received little scholarly attention. This article draws on ethnographic observation of two financial literacy programmes implemented by microfinance institutions in Cambodia to examine the current practices of financial education in the global South. The findings highlight that while financial literacy training purports to be a technical, skill‐building intervention aimed at enabling knowledge, its practices work primarily to impress upon borrowers moral lessons associated with creditworthiness, while also stressing individual responsibility for debt stress. In this way, it furthers the goals of financial providers, but fails to address the complex and real problems of debt stress. The authors suggest that financial literacy, at least where it is enacted by microfinance providers, is unlikely to moderate the problems of over‐indebtedness faced by rural borrowers.

中文翻译：

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“如果跌倒，请再次站起来”：全球南方金融素养的道德本质

在过去的十年中，许多发展参与者已开始在低收入国家实施金融知识培训。这些计划已成为针对农村贫困人口的金融普惠项目的重要支柱，但迄今为止，它们在学术上很少受到关注。本文利用人种志研究方法，对柬埔寨的小额信贷机构实施的两个金融扫盲计划进行了研究，以研究全球南方当前的金融教育做法。调查结果突出表明，虽然金融扫盲培训看起来是一种旨在提高知识水平的技术，技能建设干预措施，但其实践主要是给借款人留下与信誉相关的道德教训，同时也强调了个人应对债务压力的责任。通过这种方式，它促进了金融提供者的目标，但未能解决债务压力这一复杂而现实的问题。作者认为，至少在小额信贷提供者制定金融知识的地方，金融知识不太可能缓解农村借款人面临的过度负债问题。