While working with "ultra-poor women" in Bangladesh Lily Lapenna had the idea for MyBnk, a microfinance scheme that teaches children in some of the UK's most deprived areas about enterprise and personal finance.

In Bangladesh, I saw that microfinance, as well as being a financial tool, is even more powerful as an educational tool. I came back to the UK and started to work on what became MyBnk."

Initially Lapenna worked to support herself, before she eventually secured grants from UnLtd and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. These grants allowed her to start the first MyBnk project with a school in Tower Hamlets, east London.

Before long, a 15-minute conversation with one of Europe's richest men allowed her to get things moving. "I was given 15 minutes with Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M. I was nervous. But he phoned me 10 minutes later and asked me how much I wanted."

Since 2007, when MyBnk launched with nothing more than "a laptop and a crazy idea", it has helped more than 20,000 children and now runs programmes with more than 100 schools and youth groups. Its services include self-contained schemes such as Enterprise in a Box and Bank in a Box and are offered to schools across London and the south-east. The idea is for pupils to run their own bank to finance fellow students' social enterprises or to save money.

"I started running businesses at school," says Lapenna. "I wasn't academically engaged, but was always starting projects. They were mini social enterprises. The money raised would go to charities in Africa."

Lapenna wants to improve financial literacy in UK schools but has little time for the idea that enterprise education should be in the curriculum, at least as a theoretical subject. "I look at the fact that 97 per cent of the population receives no formal financial education. The best way to learn how to handle money and be entrepreneurial is to do it for real."