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Improvements in childhood nutrition increase schooling and economic returns in later life in a virtuous cycle. However, better nutrition also leads to an earlier onset of menstruation (menarche). In socio-cultural contexts where menarche adversely affects educational attainments, early menarche can thus break the virtuous cycle of girls’ human development. This paper focuses on one such context, India, and uses the Young Lives Longitudinal Study to show that starting menses before age twelve causes a 13% decrease in school enrollment rate. …
This brief discusses initial learning emerging from the Adaptive approaches to reducing teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone action research project. The project is accompanying three international NGOs - Concern, International Rescue Committee (IRC), and Save the Children - as they trial adaptive approaches to addressing teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone. Key messages: 1) Partners under this action research project are trialling alternative approaches to preventing teenage pregnancy, focusing on social norms change. …
Adolescent and youth reproductive health (AYRH) outcomes are influenced by factors beyond individual control. Increasingly, interventions are seeking to influence community-level normative change to support healthy AYRH behaviors. While evidence is growing of the effectiveness of AYRH interventions that include normative change components, understanding on how to achieve scale-up and wider impact of these programs remains limited. …
Global investments in girls’ education have been motivated, in part, by an expectation that more-educated women will have smaller and healthier families. However, in many low- and middle-income countries, the timing of school dropout and first birth coincide, resulting in a rapid transition from the role of student to the role of mother for adolescent girls. Despite growing interest in the effects of pregnancy on levels of school dropout, researchers have largely overlooked the potential effect of adolescent childbearing on literacy and numeracy. …
While multiple studies have documented shifting educational gradients in HIV prevalence, less attention has been given to the effect of school participation and academic skills on infection during adolescence. …
This paper focuses on senior high school students and the ways that bullying affects their school attendance. Selected items from the 2008 Ghana Global School-based Student Health Survey are analysed first to explore the relationships between the duration and type of bullying and school attendance. Second, the authors investigate whether having emotional problems, in addition to being bullied, incrementally affects the relationship between bullying and school attendance. Third, the authors explore the mitigating influence of peer friendships on these relationships. …
This technical brief will be useful to HIV programme managers in health ministries and other adolescent-related line ministries, especially those in low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, in implementing, monitoring and evaluating peer-based and adolescent-responsive and -friendly services for adolescents living with HIV. …
Adolescents and youth are a key population for reproductive health (RH) interventions, because young people suffer disproportionately from negative RH outcomes, including acquisition of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections; unintended, unwanted, or mistimed pregnancy; unsafe abortion; and gender-based violence. Effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E;) of RH interventions designed for adolescents and youth is essential to determine their success and impact and show where improvement is needed. …
This report seeks to explore the unique experience of adolescent girls by examining the types of gender-based violence affecting this group as well as drivers of this violence, within the frame of high levels of gender inequality in South Sudan. Data for this study was collected as part of the research program of the What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls (‘What Works’) Consortium funded by the government of the United Kingdom (UK)’s Department for International Development (DfID). …
This brief highlights research that examines the unique experience of adolescent girls by specifically exploring the types of gender-based violence and the drivers of this violence affecting this group within the context of South Sudan, where women and girls experience high levels of gender inequality and subordination. Key findings from this mixed-methods research can inform policymakers, UN agencies and donors as they identify and support programs that will effectively prevent and respond to violence against adolescent girls in conflict and humanitarian settings.
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. …
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. …
The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) in rural and urban Zambia aims to build social, health, and economic assets of adolescent girls. A safe spaces component is at the core of AGEP. Girls groups, under the guidance of a female mentor from the same community, provide a safe and supportive learning environment. The meetings are critical in building social assets for vulnerable girls - including friendships, self-esteem, trusting relationships with adults, and social support. …
This issue of the African Development Perspectives addresses sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in Africa, with the backdrop of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action (PoA), signed by 179 governments twenty-five years ago, in 1994, in Cairo, Egypt, and the Nairobi Summit in November 2019, where delegates will converge to reaffirm the commitments to accelerate the promises made at the 1994 Conference. …
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. …
