The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program: Lessons learned from the pilot test program

This document presents an evaluation of the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP), which is comprised of three major components: 1) safe spaces groups in which girls meet once a week over the course of two years for training on sexual and reproductive health, life skills and financial education. Groups are facilitated by a mentor, a young female from the same community as the girls; 2) a health voucher that girls can use at contracted private and public facilities for general wellness and sexual and reproductive health services; and 3) a saving account that has been designed to be girl-friendly. A randomized control trial (RCT) using a cluster design is being used to evaluate the impact of AGEP. The research aims to identify the impact of the intervention on the following key indicators: HIV prevalence, HSV-2 prevalence, age at first sex, age at first birth, contraceptive use, experience of gender-based violence, and educational attainment

The Business Case for Women's Economic Empowerment: An Integrated Approach

This document describes how the Oak Foundation commissioned Dalberg Global Development Advisors (Dalberg) and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) to better understand corporate-funded women's economic empowerment programs. This study explores what works and what doesn't, and provides a business case for how these programs can deliver greater benefits for both the women they wish to empower and for the companies themselves. At the core is the hypothesis that women's economic empowerment programs would be far more effective if corporates implement an integrated approach in partnership with the women's rights community. The evidence base for this report consists of a representative sample of 31 of the largest corporate-funded women's economic empowerment programs run by 28 companies and corporate foundations

The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program: Lessons learned from the pilot test program

Adolescent girls in Zambia face a range of risks and vulnerabilities that compromise their healthy development into young women, and lack the social, health, and economic assets to mitigate these risks. The issues that girls are confronted with include high rates of gender-based violence, unsafe sex that puts them at risk for unwanted pregnancy and HIV infection, school dropout, lack of economic resources and income-generating options, and lack of agency and participation. The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) has three major components: safe spaces groups in which girls meet once a week over the course of two years for training on sexual and reproductive health (SRH), life skills, and financial education; a health voucher to use at private and public facilities for general wellness and SRH services; and 3) a girl-friendly saving account. As this report notes, AGEP’s pilot has been critical to the success of the overall program. First, all key components of the intervention have been designed—including key research design implementation steps. After development, implementation was tested and provided key lessons learned that have led to adaptations that will enhance the rollout intervention

Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP): Financial literacy and savings—Two-year follow-up

Through the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP), the Population Council and partners implemented a social, health, and economic asset-building program in Zambia for over 11,000 vulnerable adolescent girls aged 10–19 years. The AGEP intervention was comprised of three major components: 1) weekly safe spaces groups in which girls met once a week for two years for training on sexual and reproductive health, life skills, and financial education; 2) a health voucher that girls could use at contracted private and public facilities for general wellness and sexual and reproductive health services; and 3) a savings account that was designed by the National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia (Natsave) specifically to be girl-friendly. This brief presents results from the program, which indicate that AGEP set participants on the path of long-term regular savings behavior. In addition, savings accounts remained a motivation for savings behavior—whether formal or informal—even two years after the financial-literacy and regular group meetings ended

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

Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP): Sexual and gender-based violence

Acceptability and experience of sexual and gender-based violence is alarmingly high among adolescent girls in Zambia. Even more striking is the very young age from which notions of violence are ingrained and experience with violence begins. This brief summarizes the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) evaluation which demonstrated that in the Zambian context, a program focused on changing norms among girls themselves is not enough to impact attitudes toward and experience of violence. Social and cultural norms are shaped by households, schools, communities, and all of the adults that girls interact with in these places—even the mentors of their own safe space groups. Therefore, it is likely that to change indicators on violence, work to change norms and underlying driving factors of violence needs to take place at the household and community levels, in addition to working with girls in groups to understand what violence is, why it is harmful, and why it is okay for them to aspire to a violence-free life in their school, household, and community

Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP): Health

The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) intervention was conducted over two years to support more than 11,000 vulnerable adolescent girls in Zambia. It was led by the Population Council in partnership with the Young Women’s Christian Association of Zambia (YWCA), the National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia (Natsave), and the Government of Zambia. To assess the impact of AGEP on mediating and longer-term demographic, reproductive, and health outcomes, Population Council researchers designed and implemented a longitudinal, cluster randomized controlled trial across all program areas. This brief presents the final AGEP findings, highlighting, in the Zambian context, what can be changed for girls through a girl-level intervention that focuses on building social, health, and economic assets. The program was successfully able to improve sexual and reproductive health knowledge and self-efficacy, however, additional interventions are needed to: 1) address social and cultural norms on girls’ education, rights, and values at the household, school, and community levels; and 2) address the underlying economic constraints that might prevent girls from participating and/or fully benefiting from the program

Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP): Nutrition

Adolescence is a critical period in the lives of young people and potentially a time to reap lasting benefits from interventions that improve general, sexual, nutritional, and maternal and child health. The government of Zambia is committed to improving the nutritional status of adolescents and pregnant women and their children. Nonetheless, adolescent girls in Zambia remain at risk for macro- and micro-nutrient deficiencies that have deleterious effects on growth, development, and maternal and child health. The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) nutritional curriculum, developed in partnership with PATH, was tailored to provide age-appropriate information and covered six sessions on nutrition. This brief summarizes the impact of the nutrition curriculum on nutrition outcomes of adolescents and their children one year after the AGEP program ended. The results of this rigorous randomized evaluation indicate that the AGEP nutrition training component with context-relevant participatory and interactive educational sessions did not improve adolescent or child nutritional outcomes

Cluster randomized evaluation of Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme (AGEP): study protocol.

BACKGROUND: Adolescents in less developed countries such as Zambia often face multi-faceted challenges for achieving successful transitions through adolescence to early adulthood. The literature has noted the need to introduce interventions during this period, particularly for adolescent girls, with the perspective that such investments have significant economic, social and health returns to society. The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Programme (AGEP) was an intervention designed as a catalyst for change for adolescent girls through themselves, to their family and community. METHODS/DESIGN: AGEP was a multi-sectoral intervention targeting over 10,000 vulnerable adolescent girls ages 10-19 in rural and urban areas, in four of the ten provinces of Zambia. At the core of AGEP were mentor-led, weekly girls' group meetings of 20 to 30 adolescent girls participating over two years. Three curricula - sexual and reproductive health and lifeskills, financial literacy, and nutrition - guided the meetings. An engaging and participatory pedagogical approach was used. Two additional program components, a health voucher and a bank account, were offered to some girls to provide direct mechanisms to improve access to health and financial services. Embedded within AGEP was a rigorous multi-arm randomised cluster trial with randomization to different combinations of programme arms. The study was powered to assess the impact across a set of key longer-term outcomes, including early marriage and first birth, contraceptive use, educational attainment and acquisition of HIV and HSV-2. Baseline behavioural surveys and biological specimen collection were initiated in 2013. Impact was evaluated immediately after the program ended in 2015 and will be evaluated again after two additional years of follow-up in 2017. The primary analysis is intent-to-treat. Qualitative data are being collected in 2013, 2015 and 2017 to inform the programme implementation and the quantitative findings. An economic evaluation will evaluate the incremental cost-effectiveness of each component of the intervention. DISCUSSION: The AGEP program and embedded evaluation will provide detailed information regarding interventions for adolescent girls in developing country settings. It will provide a rich information and data source on adolescent girls and its related findings will inform policy-makers, health professionals, donors and other stakeholders. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN29322231 . March 04 2016; retrospectively registered