The challenge
Adolescent girls in Uganda faced high youth unemployment, early marriage and childbearing, which limit their investment in skills and enforce dependence on men.
The case
BRAC's Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) programme, developed in Bangladesh, runs from 'adolescent development clubs' rather than schools, so it can reach girls who have dropped out, and combines vocational skills for starting small income-generating activities with life skills for informed choices about sex, reproduction and marriage. Oriana Bandiera and colleagues worked with BRAC to randomly assign clubs across 150 communities, tracking almost 5,000 adolescent girls; clubs were set up between June and September 2008, with an endline survey in 2012. In the September 2018 working-paper version, four years after the intervention girls in treated communities were 49 percentage points more likely to engage in income-generating activities, driven almost entirely by self-employment. Teen pregnancy fell by a third, early entry into marriage or cohabitation fell, and the share of girls reporting sex against their will dropped by close to a third. The take-up rate was 21%, and BRAC had started 1,200 clubs in Uganda reaching 50,000 girls.
Why it worked
The authors say the results highlight the potential of a multifaceted programme providing skills transfers 'as a viable and cost-effective policy intervention to improve the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls' over a four-year horizon.
Sources
- Bandiera, O., Buehren, N., Burgess, R., Goldstein, M., Gulesci, S., Rasul, I., & Sulaiman, M. (2020). Women's empowerment in action: Evidence from a randomized control trial in Africa. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12(1), 210–259.
- Bandiera, O., et al. (September 2018). Women's empowerment in action: Evidence from a randomized control trial in Africa (accepted version, LSE Research Online).
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