Nedbank's latest campaign shines light on financial abuse against women

The key insight to the campaign was that amongst the various forms of abuse that women face, money is also used as a form of abuse and financial abuse occurs in 99% of abusive relationships. The main objective of the campaign was to raise awareness about this often not spoken about topic, highlighting the role of Nedbank and POWA in supporting financial empowerment, and encouraging conversations around financial independence.

“16 Days of Activism aims to eliminate violence against women and girls. Through this campaign, we wanted to highlight real issue of financial abuse, a form of economic control where abusers restrict victims’ access to financial resources, making them dependent and trapped in abusive situations, but we also wanted to challenge the other big players to do the same” says Khuthala Gala Holten, co-managing director at Joe Public.

The campaign included Nedbank placing precautionary labels (warning strips) on their advertising collateral and partnering with influencers to do the same. The campaign sparked a nationwide conversation around the violence no one’s talking about and offered support to victims to regain autonomy and break free from the cycles of abuse through their microsite.

“The issue of financial abuse is not just one bank’s battle. We wanted to take things even further, by giving other banks the opportunity to do their part, while positioning ourselves as the first bank to officially take a stance on the issue of financial abuse. A couple days into the launch of our campaign, we made our Warning Strip CI guide available on our website,” says Khensani Nobanda, group executive of marketing and corporate affairs at Nedbank.