Identifying the most deprived in rural Ethiopia and Uganda: A simple measure of socio-economic deprivation

The Extreme Deprivation Index uses easily verifiable answers to ten questions about the ownership of the most basic non-food wage goods - things that poor people in a variety of rural contexts want to have because they make a real difference to the quality of their lives. Using this Index, we define rural Ethiopians and Ugandans who lack access to a few basic consumer goods as 'most deprived': they are at risk of failing to achieve adequate education and nutrition; becoming pregnant as a teenager; remaining dependent on manual agricultural wage labour and failing to find to a decent job. As in other African countries, they have derived relatively little benefit from donor and government policies claiming to reduce poverty. They may continue to be ignored if the impact of policy on the bottom 10 per cent can be obscured by fashionably complex indices of poverty. We emphasize the practical and political relevance of the simple un-weighted Deprivation Index: if interventions currently promoted by political leaders and aid officials can easily be shown to offer few or no benefits to the poorest rural people, then pressures to introduce new policies may intensify, or at least become less easy to ignore

An agenda for policy and action to support girls through puberty and menarche

Puberty and menstruation are a fundamental part of adolescent girls’ lives, yet many girls in low- and middle-income countries know very little about the resulting physical and emotional changes. This lack of knowledge can reinforce feelings of fear, shame or embarrassment—especially when coupled with sociocultural norms that deem girls and women ‘impure’ or ‘dangerous’ during menstruation. This digest explores what we do and don’t know about girls’ experiences and knowledge of puberty and menstruation. It sets out an agenda for action for those working with and for adolescent girls, to start to challenge the stigma surrounding puberty and menstruation by increasing access to information, providing girl-friendly water and sanitation facilities, tackling harmful social norms and investing in better monitoring, evaluation and research

GAGE baseline qualitative research tools

Although our understanding of the risks and vulnerabilities that adolescent girls and boys face has grown exponentially over the last decade, with adolescents becoming an increasingly visible target group within development (Viner et al., 2015; Harper et al., 2018), our understanding of what works remains nascent. In seeking to address this, we observed that qualitative methodologies for working with especially young adolescents and evaluating programme effectiveness with young people remain relatively underdeveloped. In an effort to contribute to this fledgling field, the GAGE consortium undertook extensive formative fieldwork in five diverse contexts in 2016 to pilot a range of different methodological approaches and instruments, some inspired by studies undertaken in the Global North, others from the Global South, and through our team’s collective brainstorming on what had worked with this age group in past research. The current set of tools reflects the collective learning among senior and junior researchers in the consortium from five country contexts across Africa, Asia and the Middle East