Hong Kong teen makes cents of finance, taps AI to tackle economic inequality

Hong Kong secondary school student Agastya Rekhi is just 17, but he has been teaching finance and economics to younger children for nearly three years.

Meeting families struggling to understand how prices, investments and economic news impacted their daily lives during voluntary work convinced him that access to information was only part of the problem. How that information was communicated was just as important.

Rekhi, a finalist for the Spirit of Youth Award in this year’s Spirit of Hong Kong Awards, has since launched three student-led projects spanning financial education, simplified economic news and AI support for smaller organisations.

He started Launchpad at 14, leveraging his interests in games and art to teach economics, business and financial literacy to children. Rekhi said the project has held about 105 sessions, reaching 215 students across Hong Kong, India and the United Kingdom.

Instead of relying on textbooks, lessons turn economic concepts into activities.

For example, the concept of the “tragedy of the commons”, coined by American ecologist Garrett Hardin to describe how overusing shared resources causes collective ruin, was taught through a game in which children shared a plate of marshmallows using chopsticks.

Through this, students learned how taking too many out of self-interest left fewer shared resources for everyone else.

Rekhi said the intention was to make concepts that can appear intimidating more familiar, particularly for children who may not grow up discussing money or investing at home.

“Financial literacy is often thought of as something that maybe privileged people talk about with their parents. That leaves a lot of the public without support,” he said.

He also encourages young people to understand investment fundamentals and risk before putting money into speculative assets, cautioning against excessive leverage and short-term trading.

A second project, The Bottom Line, began about two years ago as a school newsletter explaining economic and financial news in plain English. Rekhi said it has grown to an 18-member team, with about 23 partner organisations distributing it to more than 6,500 monthly readers as of September.

The publication also prompted him to reconsider who his target audience really was.

During a visit to subdivided flats in To Kwa Wan, Rekhi met a woman who was saving for her daughter to attend university in the United States while coping with rising household costs. Because she mainly spoke Cantonese, friends had to step in to translate.

Rekhi said the encounter made him realise that publishing only in English had unintentionally excluded people who might benefit most from accessible economic information.

A Chinese edition was subsequently introduced and distributed through local schools and charities.

Last year, he launched his third initiative, Illuminet, connecting students interested in artificial intelligence (AI) with charities and small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to adopt the technology on their own.

Students help these firms set up tools such as automated drafting or simple chatbots, so they can use AI without hiring full-time technical staff. Rekhi noted that while larger companies have greater capacity to use new technology, smaller organisations risk being left behind.

Although the three projects operate differently, Rekhi sees them as responses to the same problem: economic inequality. Launchpad equips younger students with financial knowledge, The Bottom Line makes economic news easier to understand, and Illuminet helps smaller organisations use emerging technology.

Looking ahead, Rekhi hopes to study economics at university and eventually help shape policies that allow economic growth to benefit people across all income brackets.

“I want to ensure that people from all backgrounds have the knowledge and interest to participate in the financial system,” he said.

The Spirit of Hong Kong Awards were established in 2013 to recognise society’s unsung heroes and organisations whose work might escape public attention.