The impact of the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) on short and long term social, economic, education and fertility outcomes: a cluster randomized controlled trial in Zambia
Summary & Objectives
The study evaluated whether the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP), a two-year safe-spaces intervention in Zambia combining weekly girls’ groups, sexual and reproductive health and life-skills education, financial education, a health voucher and a youth-friendly savings account, improved girls’ social, health and economic assets in the short term and led to longer-term gains in education and fertility outcomes (delayed sex, marriage, pregnancy and childbearing)
Findings
AGEP produced modest, sustained improvements in a small set of indicators: girls in intervention areas had slightly higher SRH knowledge, financial literacy (short term), savings behaviour, self-efficacy and lower reports of transactional sex than controls. However, the programme did not change HIV knowledge, gender norms, acceptance of intimate partner violence, or the primary education and fertility outcomes (school completion, age at sex, pregnancy, birth or marriage), even two years after the intervention ended. Treatment-on-the-treated analyses showed larger effects on the same limited set of indicators but still no impact on education or fertility, and subgroup analyses suggested particularly vulnerable girls remained at high risk of early marriage and pregnancy
Recommendations
The authors conclude that girl-focused safe-space and asset-building programmes alone are insufficient to shift educational attainment and fertility trajectories for very vulnerable girls in this context. They recommend complementing such programmes with interventions that directly address household poverty (e.g. cash or cash-plus models) and tackling restrictive gender norms and violence at household and community levels using a broader socio-ecological approach. Future programming should integrate economic support to families, norm-change components, and attention to the wider social and economic environment in which girls live, rather than relying solely on individual asset-building.
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