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A Kuwaiti behavioural scientist has the data to prove the country’s harder problem is capability, not capital
Almost every young woman who walked into a Lei Wa Lakom financial literacy workshop in Kuwait had never taken a course in personal finance. Not most of them. Almost all of them: 96.6 per cent, by the organisation’s own count.
That figure sits inside an impact report published this year by Lei Wa Lakom, the Kuwaiti financial literacy and women’s empowerment organisation founded in 2021 by Taiba Hamad Al-Humaidhi. It deserves more attention than it has received, because it quietly reframes a question Kuwait has been asking itself for decades.
The country is wealthy by any global measure. It is one of the few remaining economies with no income tax and no VAT, meaning citizens retain their full net income. And yet, as the report notes, a significant share of the population carries debt, purchasing power is under pressure, and taxation is visible on the horizon. Abundant financial resources, diminishing financial resilience. The report calls this a paradox. It is more usefully understood as a diagnosis.
The argument beneath the numbers
Al-Humaidhi has argued that present bias, the human tendency to overweight immediate rewards against future ones, does not stop at the level of the individual. It scales. It shapes households, then institutions, then economies. Her academic work sits precisely here: a master’s in behavioural science from the London School of Economics, and a doctorate in progress focused on financial behaviour, decision-making and nudging.
The extension of that argument is uncomfortable in a productive way. If a country’s wealth is measured in what it holds, Kuwait is rich. If it is measured in what it can convert that holding into, the picture becomes a question rather than an answer. Reserves can be counted today. Capability cannot be bought on the same timeline.
This is the distinction that makes human capital the hardest test of long-term thinking any economy faces. Fiscal decisions can be taken quickly when circumstances force them. Skills, habits and institutional quality compound over decades, and the compounding only starts when someone begins.
What the evidence actually shows
Lei Wa Lakom’s contribution has been to stop arguing the point and start measuring it.
A study co-authored by Al-Humaidhi with Faisal AlReshaid, Assistant Dean of the College of Business and Economics at the American University of Kuwait, and Kenda Alzayed of the National Bank of Kuwait, was published in the World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, validating a comprehensive financial literacy questionnaire for Kuwaiti youth. The sample ran to 1,064 respondents aged 18 to 25. The instrument began with seven proposed domains covering budgeting, savings, investments, debt management, financial planning, risk awareness and digital financial tools. Four survived validation: consuming behaviour, information literacy, financial practices and investment behaviour. The full paper is openly accessible.
The significance is not the questionnaire itself. It is that Kuwait now has a baseline. Progress on human capability is impossible to claim, and impossible to fund, without one.
The workshop data underneath it is where the argument gets its teeth. Among participants surveyed before and after a series of financial literacy workshops delivered with the Women and Gender Studies Unit at Kuwait University’s College of Social Sciences, the proportion who had never prepared a budget fell from 48.3 per cent to 24.7 per cent. Those tracking expenses weekly rose from 22.5 per cent to 36 per cent. Those saving a fixed amount most months rose from 23.6 per cent to 37.1 per cent. Students planning to invest moved from 34 per cent to 47 per cent.
These are self-reported shifts measured close to the intervention, and the report says so plainly. But they point at something worth noticing: the gap being closed is not one of intelligence or income. It is a gap of exposure. People who had never been taught changed their behaviour when they were.
The result they published anyway
The most revealing line in the entire report is a failure.
Alongside the workshops, the team ran a nudge experiment using SMS reminders. The finding, recorded in the report without softening: no immediate impact.
Organisations that exist to be seen doing good do not usually print the interventions that did not work. That the result appears at all indicates the project is being run as research rather than as reputation. It also happens to be the more interesting finding. Knowledge transfers relatively easily. Behaviour does not. A workshop can move what someone understands within hours; moving what they do, durably, requires commitment devices, defaults and social norms operating over far longer periods than a text message.
That is not a mark against the programme. It is the reason the programme has to be a decade-long project rather than a campaign.
Four words doing a great deal of work
Several things are arriving in Kuwait at once. Taxation is under discussion. Wider access to mortgage finance would place a long-dated obligation on households whose baseline financial practices, by this data, have not been formally taught. And buy-now-pay-later credit is already within easy reach of younger consumers, embedding a borrow-first habit early.
Al-Humaidhi has been direct about the last of these, and her objection begins with the language rather than the economics. The standard framing of the product is live now, pay later. The verb, she points out, is carrying an implication: that without the service, a person is not really living. Her correction is blunt. Enjoy now, pay later would be accurate. Anyone who needs credit in order to live now has a living standards problem, not a financial products one.
The spending pattern supports the reframing. Citing 2026 figures from the financial platform Empower, she notes that the leading categories for this kind of credit are electronics, clothing and food delivery, rather than rent, utilities or the weekly grocery shop. The same source puts more than half of users at 35 or under, with adoption among Gen Z at around 40 per cent. Roughly a quarter say they are more likely to buy simply because the option is presented. Thirty-eight per cent report that paying this way feels less real than using a debit or credit card. Late payments are climbing, with close to one in four users missing one in 2024, up from 18 per cent the year before, and a comparable share having lost track of what they owe across concurrent loans.
Against that she sets the scale on which living in Kuwait actually operates. A July 2026 analysis by Ali Bahbahani and Partners modelled the lifetime cost of a Kuwaiti household from birth to age 80 at roughly KD 4.13 million, with the state carrying a little over half, around KD 2.27 million. Her question is what it means for a marketing phrase to borrow that word for a discretionary electronics purchase, and whether a generation is being taught lifestyle inflation before it has access to funds it may never receive.
The proposal she attaches is more interesting than the critique. Before a campaign launches, she asks, why not simulate its behavioural trajectory. What does a decade of that messaging do to the paycheck of a twenty-year-old who has no responsibilities yet and is being trained, gently and profitably, to defer them?
The part nobody in Kuwait can answer
Here the argument runs into a wall, and Al-Humaidhi says so plainly. Every figure above is international. On adoption inside Kuwait there is, by her account, nothing. Nobody is tracking how many young Kuwaitis use these products, what they use them for, or what it is doing to their savings.
That absence is the same problem the financial literacy index was built to solve, one product category over. A behaviour that goes unmeasured cannot be governed, funded against, or argued about with any precision. It can only be noticed later, once it has become a pattern, which is generally the point at which correcting it is expensive.
From measurement to system
Lei Wa Lakom’s stated plan reads accordingly. The workshop programme is scheduled to scale to four universities by the end of 2026, including Kuwait University, the American University of Kuwait, Kuwait Technical College and the American International University. The financial literacy index is to be published with annual updates, turning a single measurement into a trend line. A digital product, the Lumen App, is planned to extend financial planning and mentorship beyond the classroom. The programme has also been extended through a partnership with the Kuwait Women’s Economic Empowerment Platform.
The organisation, which operates as a not-for-profit, is convening a Women and The Economy conference on 17 and 18 October in partnership with Kuwait University and under the patronage of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Taken individually, these are the activities of a capable non-profit. Taken together, they describe something more deliberate: a measurement instrument, a delivery mechanism, a distribution channel and a policy forum, assembled in sequence around a single thesis.
That thesis is straightforward, and Al-Humaidhi has been consistent about it. Kuwait’s biggest asset is its people. The resources bought the country time. What is done with the time is the actual test, and it is being run now, in cohorts of a few dozen students at a time, with pre- and post-surveys attached.
Money can be deployed in a quarter. Capability takes a generation, and it cannot be purchased later at any price. Which is exactly why the work of building it is so easy to defer, and so costly to have deferred.
