Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme: Endline technical report

The theory of change behind the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) posited that adolescent girls are empowered by building social, health, and economic assets that they can then draw on to reduce vulnerabilities and expand opportunities. In the long term, they will then increase their likelihood of completing school, delaying sexual debut, and reducing risks of early marriages, unintended pregnancies, acquisition of HIV, and other possibly detrimental outcomes. This endline report indicates that, while there were some changes for the program participants in the medium and long term, they did not translate into longer-term effects on reproductive and demographic outcomes as hypothesized via the theory of change. However, interpretation of these results is constrained by two important factors: 1) a large proportion of the girls invited to the program did not participate, and 2) among those who did participate, only a subsegment of them participated actively in the safe-spaces sessions. The AGEP evaluation is an important contribution to the understanding of adolescent transitions and interventions in Zambia which should contribute to the improvement of current programs, as well as development of new programs and funding strategies

Über die Verteilung der Fermente des Nucleinstoffwechsels.

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Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme: Research and evaluation mid-term technical report

The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme (AGEP) was a social, health, and economic asset-building program targeting vulnerable adolescent girls aged 10–19. The Population Council, in partnership with the Young Women’s Christian Association of Zambia, successfully implemented the AGEP program from late 2013 to early 2016. The results presented in this midterm report have implications for recommendations on future programming for adolescent girls in Zambia and elsewhere and should be coupled with burgeoning evidence from AGEP and the literature to adapt programming for vulnerable adolescent girls in order to improve impact. While the underlying root causes of girls’ vulnerabilities are interrelated, it is possible that a more direct focus on a particular outcome, driven by a more targeted intervention, would have led to greater impact in the shorter term. For older adolescents, it may imply a direct focus on livelihoods and entrepreneurship, whereas younger adolescents may need more focus on educational support. Also, providing direct resources through incentivized activities may be a constructive approach to increasing engagement with the program

Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme: Research and evaluation mid-term technical report—Executive Summary

The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme (AGEP) was an ambitious project directed toward changing girls’ lives in a significant and meaningful way across areas of education, sexual and reproductive health, marriage and fertility, and experience of violence. This Executive Summary of the project’s findings shows that, overall, the AGEP cohort data, and lessons they have generated from the AGEP are rich, nuanced, and important for informing the next generation of programs for adolescents in Zambia and elsewhere. Even though the study is still under way, and the full longer-term effects of AGEP remain to be seen, the information presented in this report can be used to guide programs and policymakers on program areas of promise, gaps that need to be filled, and a range of questions about how to best serve this population that still need to be answered

Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme: Research and evaluation baseline technical report

The theory of change behind the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) posits that adolescent girls are empowered by acquiring social, health, and economic assets. Girls can draw on these assets to reduce vulnerabilities and expand opportunities, thereby increasing their likelihood of completing school, delaying sexual debut, and reducing the risk of early marriage, unintended pregnancy, acquisition of HIV, and so on. AGEP serves vulnerable adolescent girls in Zambia aged 10–19 in two age cohorts: 10–14-year-olds and 15–19-year-olds. AGEP operates in ten “master sites,” five urban and five rural, in four provinces of Zambia. The three core components of AGEP in Zambia are: safe spaces, savings accounts, and health vouchers. The primary aim of the research outlined in this baseline technical report is to obtain as rigorous an assessment as possible of the impact of AGEP on mediating, and on longer-term demographic, reproductive, and health outcomes among vulnerable adolescent girls as they age from 10–19 in 2013 to 14–23 in 2017