NON-PROFIT financial education centre Aidha was not set up to help Singaporean women battling hard times.

Its original brief was to equip maids and other migrant women here with entrepreneurial skills to take back to their communities.

But in a telling sign of the times, Aidha's telephone has been ringing off the hook with calls for help from jobless Singaporean women.

Founder Sarah Mavrinac, 41, notes: 'They asked to learn business skills to generate an income for themselves, after many of them lost their jobs.'

So the president of Aidha expanded the group's constitution, which previously limited it to helping only foreign domestic workers, to include local women too.

By September, Aidha, which is run by over 400 ad- hoc volunteers, will roll out financial literacy courses, small business management programmes and entrepreneurship workshops for Singaporean women as well.

The volunteers include 15 finance, management and communications lecturers from institutions like the Singapore Management University, Insead and EDHEC Graduate Business School, and other volunteers ranging from marketing and outreach advisers to students who conduct computer workshops.

Its first local students will be 65 women, who have suffered family violence, from the Singapore Council of Women's Organisations' Star Shelter.

While the recession has meant emotional and financial turmoil for everyone, Dr Mavrinac notes it has been especially hard on embattled women. 'Many of them don't have money they can call their own. Others face fears about exploding credit card debt. And there are some who fear for their own safety when the financial stress becomes too much for their husbands to take,' she says.

'The need for women to know that they can take control of their lives and improve their situations, if they learn how to save and plan for their futures, is especially important today. This is where we step in - advising, counselling and educating.'

She hopes that Aidha - which means 'that to which we aspire' in Sanskrit - will be able to repeat the success it has had with domestic workers.

Since its inception in 2006, it has helped 1,000 maids in Singapore acquire financial self-improvement skills, such as learning how to save and set aside their earnings for their children's education and for their personal pension plans. Or generating an income for themselves by investing in feasible business ideas.

One key initiative, Financial Compass Clubs, started in early 2008, has been a major success and will soon be open to local women. The programme sees 14 groups of 10 maids gather monthly to inspire each other to save for their future.

Through it, Filipino maid Vicky Biwang, 44, who supervises the programme on her weekly day off, has inspired 10 members to save an average of $1,500 each within half a year, on monthly salaries of about $400.

With the money saved, one maid has set her mother up in a small eatery business. Another has bought a tricycle for her husband's taxi business. Yet another has opened a pre-school in India.

Others have launched their own small businesses from afar - ranging from eateries to provision shops, employing relatives and friends to run operations, while they remain in Singapore to earn and save.

In 2006, Dr Mavrinac gave up her five-figure monthly salary as a professor at Insead's Singapore campus to set up Aidha, which began operations in July that year. Her husband, Dr Neil Jones, 52, a management professor at the Singapore Management University (SMU), now supports the family while she works unsalaried at Aidha. They have a son Harrison, eight, and a daughter, Sophie, four.

But she maintains the transition was not that dramatic. 'It wasn't really changing careers. I simply began teaching the same subject to different students. Ultimately, I'm still a teacher imparting financial know-how.'

Today, she works about 12 hours a day, seven days a week, splitting her time between Aidha and various boards, which include the United Nations Development Fund for Women and the World Bank's International Global Banking Alliance for Women. She also teaches an MBA course at SMU.

She has never regretted the switch. 'The opportunity to use my experience as an educator in a very different setting, for the advancement of a group of women I admired enormously, was something I could not afford to miss. I wanted to help society, not merely instruct professionals.'

While continuing to be dedicated to Aidha's original purpose of enriching the lives of foreign domestic workers, she is going all out to help local women understand the basics of money management.

Women are often the ones who control household budgets and are in the best position to educate their children on sound money management, she explains.

'Get your finances right and the other aspects of your life will fall into place,' she says. 'If we are effective stewards of our money, we are in turn effective captains of our lives and effective guardians of those we love.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.