Member Interest Groups

Actuaries Without Frontiers

Chair: Nicky Patchett
Members: Iona Abrahams, Colin Dutkiewicz, Wim Els, Elize Gouws, Steve Handler, Ndivhuwo Ravele, Krishen Sukdev, Michael Tichareva.

Actuaries Without Frontiers aims at utilising actuarial skills outside traditional areas to make a meaningful difference in the lives of individuals. Some of the ways in which members can get involved include:

• Getting funding for projects
• Determining whether it is best to support existing initiatives or start our own initiative
• Finding out exactly what communities need
• Helping with the writing of the financial education curriculum, pulling together from existing curricula
• Helping to train teachers in communities
• Becoming teachers themselves

The initiative was announced at the Annual Convention of the Actuarial Society in Johannesburg in early November 2007. 

The first major project of the committee was a financial literacy initiative, in partnership with the Gauteng Department of Economic Development.

The committee in South Africa hopes to extend its activities to other initiatives, as well as to apply some of the projects and learnings from elsewhere in the world (e.g. India) to South Africa.  Similarly, it is hoped that our financial literacy initiative could be a model which could be applied in other (particularly developing) countries with similar needs.