Building sustainable and scalable peer-based programming: promising approaches from TESFA in Ethiopia
Summary & Objectives
The paper examines how CARE’s TESFA programme for married adolescent girls in Amhara, Ethiopia was able to sustain and organically scale peer-based “Girls Groups” and community Social Analysis and Action (SAA) groups five years after programme closure. It aims to identify which factors enabled long-term maintenance and replication of these groups, and how this sustained model continues to mitigate some of the harmful effects of child marriage on girls’ sexual and reproductive health, agency and mobility.
Findings
The study finds that many TESFA Girls Groups remained active and that new, auto-replicated groups emerged without external support, with sustained improvements in girls’ contraceptive use, institutional delivery, and participation in reproductive decision-making. Participants and community members reported reduced acceptance of early and child marriage and active efforts to delay girls’ marriages. Key drivers of sustainability and scale included strong solidarity and “sisterhood” among girls, increased mobility and voice in households, economic empowerment through savings and loans, supportive husbands and community leaders, and the integration of TESFA content into existing social structures. Groups that dissolved often faced dwindling curriculum content, weaker group cohesion, or loss of spousal support
Recommendations
The authors recommend that peer-based programmes for married and at-risk girls seeking to address the harms of child marriage prioritise creating safe, solidaristic girl-only spaces, embed work with husbands and wider community members through holistic, gender-transformative platforms, and couple SRH content with meaningful economic opportunities. They advise designing flexible, culturally relevant curricula that can be refreshed over time, sharing facilitation roles to avoid over-reliance on single leaders, and building pathways into longer-term financial services to sustain groups. For child-marriage programming specifically, they highlight the value of leveraging existing community structures and organised diffusion to consolidate norm change around delaying marriage while strengthening married girls’ agency, mobility and access to SRH services.
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