Financial literacy education for LGBTQI+ young adults in Vietnam: Counter-stories of trauma, advocacy, and resiliency

Financial literacy is an essential component of human capital to help enhance financial wellbeing. However, systemic oppression can create significant barriers for many LGBTQI + individuals accessing financial education. Consequently, they may have insufficient financial literacy, causing financial exclusion and vulnerabilities to financial fraud and scams. Data availability and advice, and specifically qualitative data regarding financial literacy education of LGBTQI + people in Vietnam, is very limited. Drawing on concepts of financial literacy, critical pedagogy, intersectionality, and Thich’s teachings about diversity, transformation, and emancipation, this critical ethnography, using data gathered through surveys and focus groups, examines the problematic nature of financial literacy education and its impact on LGBTQI + young adults (aged 18–35) in Vietnam, a Global South context impacted by pedagogical paradigms rooted in the Global North. The analysis includes overarching themes: (1) discrimination and exclusion of LGBTQI + individuals’ access to financial literacy education; (2) the impacts of laws on LGBTQI + individuals’ sense of insecurity and insufficient financial literacy; and (3) resiliency and transformation. This small, mixed-methods study shares the counter-stories of participants with limited generalizability of results.