Improving the Well-Being of Adolescent Girls in Developing Countries
Summary & Objectives
The paper aims to review interventions that can plausibly improve the well-being of adolescent girls in low- and middle-income countries by increasing educational attainment and delaying childbearing and marriage. It seeks to synthesize evidence from 108 interventions across 78 studies, classify them into key intervention categories, and assess which approaches show consistent promise for these outcomes.
Findings
The review finds that transfer programs are generally effective at increasing girls’ schooling, but their impact on delaying fertility and marriage is mixed and highly context dependent. Building schools in underserved areas and providing information on returns to education and academic performance also increase educational attainment. No intervention category consistently delays pregnancies or reduces child marriage across settings, although targeted sexual and reproductive health services and expanded job opportunities for young women appear promising but lack robust long-term evidence.
Recommendations
The authors recommend scaling up interventions that reliably improve schooling while avoiding assumptions that these alone will delay childbearing and marriage without complementary components. They call for more rigorous evaluations of sexual and reproductive health and economic opportunity programs that track long-term impacts on fertility and marriage. Future studies should include short-term outcomes that credibly proxy long-term welfare gains and collect detailed cost data to inform decisions about cost-effectiveness and scalability.
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