Can adolescent girls can be empowered in rural settings, if so, how? What effect does this have on their economic outcomes, self confidence and aspirations, as well as those of their siblings, adolescent friends, and parents?

Policies that aim to enable and empower the 1.3 billion young people aged 12-24 in the developing world will determine the quality of the next generation of economic and social actors. We will evaluate an intervention designed to shed light on this issue directly. The intervention - known as the Adolescent Development Programme (ADP) - aims to increase the economic empowerment of adolescent girls in rural Uganda and Tanzania and is implemented by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). The ADP provides a package of empowerment related skills, comprising elements of life-skills training, income generation skills training, and access to microfinance. Through an examination of the effects of this program on the target adolescents and those around them, the impact evaluation of this program will provide rigorous policy guidance to inform three key planks of the Africa Action Plan (support for small businesses, women's empowerment and skill building) as well as for the Gender Action Plan's goal of empowering women to compete in markets. 

The intervention seeks to address the two main problems that plagued previous programs. First, it provides skills and training along a large range of complementary dimensions. It is designed to enhance individual capabilities to make informed decisions and to link their new aspirations and capabilities to opportunities that enable economic empowerment.

Second, this intervention provides financial literacy training and access to microfinance. While microfinance programs have proved to be an important pathway out of poverty, so far they have mostly been targeted to adult women, largely bypassing adolescent and unmarried girls. In contrast, this intervention views financial literacy and access to credit as complements to the life and income generating skills. Ultimately, this complete package of skills can empower adolescent girls to take control of their economic lives and provides better prospects to have a long lasting impact of their well being over the life cycle.

The ADP intervention will be evaluated using a randomized design. Randomization will occur at the village level, where villages within the same sub-district will be randomly assigned to be either a treated or control village. BRAC, which has a strong track record of using impact evaluation and is committed to this design, will work with the implementing agencies to randomize the allocation of the program across villages.

The evaluation will cover 300 villages, equally split across Uganda and Tanzania. Of these, 200 randomly selected villages will receive the intervention – namely life skills training, income generating training, and microfinance. The other 100 randomly selected villages will serve as a control group and no ADC will be established in these villages. BRAC field staff is currently drawing up a list of all the eligible adolescent girls and their households in each village. From this population of eligible adolescent girls – namely girls aged between 14 and 20 - we will randomly select a sample of 40 eligible girls. This leads to a sample size of 12000 adolescent girls - 4000 in control communities and 8000 in treatment communities.