Selim Gulesci

Empowering adolescent girls : evidence from a randomized control trial in Uganda

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Empowering adolescent girls : evidence from a randomized control trial in Uganda, conducted in the year between June and September 2008, in Uganda. The study observed that nearly 60 percent of Ugandas population is aged below 20. This generation faces health and economic challenges associated with HIV, early pregnancy and unemployment. Whether these challenges are due to a lack of information and/or vocational skills is however uncertain. The program significantly increases self-reported entrepreneurial skills. There is a 4.2 percentage point increase in likelihood of participation in income earning activities, which represents a 32 percent increase. Almost all of this increase is seen in self-employment activities. Funding for the study derives from Bank Netherlands, MasterCard, Nike, The Gender Action Plan, improving institutions for Pro-Poor Growth at DFID.

Women's Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Africa ¤

Women in developing countries are disempowered: high youth unemployment, early marriage and childbearing interact to limit their investments into human capital and enforce dependence on men. We evaluate a multifaceted policy intervention attempting to jump-start adolescent womens empowerment in Uganda, a context in which 60% of the population are aged below twenty. The intervention aims to relax human capital constraints that adolescent girls face by simultaneously providing them vocational training and information on sex, reproduction and marriage. We find that four years post-intervention, adolescent girls in treated communities are 4.9pp more likely to engage in income generating activities, corresponding to a 48% increase over baseline levels, and an impact almost entirely driven by their greater engagement in self-employment. Teen pregnancy falls by a third, and early entry into marriage/cohabitation also falls rapidly. Strikingly, the share of girls reporting sex against their will drops by close to a third and aspired ages at which to marry and start childbearing move forward. The results highlight the potential of a multifaceted program that provides skills transfers as a viable and cost effective policy intervention to improve the economic and social empowerment of adolescent girls over a four year horizon.

Evaluation of an adolescent development program for girls in Tanzania

This paper evaluates a program targeted to adolescent girls in Tanzania that aims to empower them economically as well as socially. The program was found to be highly successful in Uganda in terms of economic, health, and social outcomes. In contrast, this evaluation finds that the program did not have any notable effect on most of these outcomes in the Tanzanian setting. The evaluation also measures the impact of the program with and without microcredit services. The findings show that the addition of microcredit improves the take-up of the program and savings of the participants. The paper explores programmatic implementation information that helps explain the marked difference in outcomes between Uganda and Tanzania. This research shows that layering additional microfinance services onto an adolescent development program can be an effective tool to attain greater inclusion of youth in financial services, and brings out important issues of the generalizability of the research findings.