Practice-based solution
Solutions
Empowerment and Livelihood of Adolescents (ELA)
A youth empowerment programmes offering safe spaces and mentor-led, community-supported programming, with a focus on girls and women. Through a combination of social empowerment, education, and economic empowerment, young people gain the knowledge and tools to overcome barriers and reach their full potential.
This program is implemented by No Means No Worldwide, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, USA, Peru, Pakistan, Republic of the Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya |Impower
Published: 27 septiembre 2024
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Summary
Context
Girls in low and middle income countries face disproportionate risks during adolescence that can hinder their transitions into adulthood. These include high barriers to education and economic opportunity and high levels of teenage pregnancy, early marriage, and gender-based violence. This can increase the likelihood of early marriage and childbearing, and make girls more dependent on older men.
Harder to accumulate education and livelihood skills, this limits their ability to gain employment later in life, creating a cycle of economic and social disempowerment in adolescence that carries into adulthood.
Intervention type |
Adolescent development clubs |
Assessment |
Adolescent development clubs has been classified as EFFECTIVE |
INSPIRE pillar |
Safe environments |
Evidence type: |
Evidenced-based solutions |
Small group interventions for children and adolescents outside of schools classified as PROMISING
Intervention type |
School-based self-defense interventions for sexual violence prevention |
Assessment |
School-based self-defense interventions for sexual violence prevention is classified as EFFECTIVE |
INSPIRE pillar |
Education and life skills |
Evidence type: |
Evidenced-based solutions |
Adolescent development clubs has been classified as effective. See other examples of this type of intervention:
School-based self-defense interventions for sexual violence prevention |
School-based self-defense interventions for sexual violence prevention |
Assessment: |
School-based self-defense interventions for sexual violence prevention are classified as EFFECTIVE. |
INSPIRE pillar: |
Education and life skills |
Evidence type: |
Evidenced-based solutions |
Another heading
Self-defence curriculum |
Info here |
Classified |
Conflicting |
Inspire pillar |
Norms and values |
School-based interventions to prevent harmful or problematic sexual behaviors by children and adolescents are considered conflicting. See examples of other programs showcasing this type of intervention in action:
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Background of the program
THe program
The Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) model, under BRAC International's Youth Empowerment programme, is designed to empower adolescent girls and young women with life-skills, livelihood training, vocational training and startup kits to start small-scale businesses. Their adolescent clubs also serve as a social space for girls who learn and share their reproductive and sexual health issues and provide relevant learning materials and support recreational activities such as reading, dancing, and indoor and outdoor games.
Empowered, educated girls are better equipped to avoid child marriage, delay teenage pregnancy, and build healthier futures for themselves, their families, and their communities.
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Background of the program
ELA is a youth empowerment program offering safe spaces and mentor-led, community-supported programming, with a focus on girls and women. Through a combination of social empowerment, education, and economic empowerment, young people gain the knowledge and
ELA is a youth empowerment program offering safe spaces and mentor-led, community-supported programming, with a focus on girls and women. Through a combination of social empowerment, education, and economic empowerment, young people gain the knowledge and tools to overcome barriers and reach their full potential.
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Program overview
“ Programs like ELA are shaped not by presuming that development workers and program designers know best, but by giving voice to young people’s concerns and aspirations—and then giving them the means to shape their own futures. ”
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, BRAC Founder and Chairperson
Opportunity for a better life
Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) is a program that seeks to offer hundreds of thousands of adolescent girls the opportunity for a better life through livelihoods, mentorship, life skills training and microfinance. It targets girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in Bangladesh, Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Liberia.
Both programs start with “safe spaces” close to the home, where teens can discuss problems with their peers in small groups and build their social networks, away from the pressures of family and male-centered communities. Health education, confidence building and other life skills are added to the mix.
Finally, as one of the world’s earlier and largest providers of microfinance, BRAC has added a financial component. For younger girls, the emphasis is on social skills development and creating a savings mentality, but by their mid-teens – the exact age differs from context to context – there is a demand among adolescent girls for livelihood training, financial literacy and sometimes microloans.
Programe content
The Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) model, under BRAC International's Youth Empowerment programme, is designed to empower adolescent girls and young women with life-skills, livelihood training, vocational training and startup kits to start small-scale businesses. Their adolescent clubs also serve as a social space for girls who learn and share their reproductive and sexual health issues and provide relevant learning materials and support recreational activities such as reading, dancing, and indoor and outdoor games.
Outcomes of the ELA program include:
- Intrapersonal competencies:
Self-confidence, entrepreneurial mindset, self-worth, personal autonomy to take care of themselves - Interpersonal competencies:
Giving girls the confidence they need to assert themselves and resolve conflicts. Leadership, negotiation, communication, empathy, effective communication - Cognitive competencies:
How to learn, earn and save – along with livelihood skills training, business planning, training in entrepreneurship, budget management, savings. Creativity, decision-making, numeracy skills, awareness of rights. - Attitudes and values:
Learn the importance of staying in school and avoiding early marriage and pregnancy. Entrepreneurial mindset. Taking control of their lives. - Pedagogy/ Active engagement of students:
Discussion, role-playing, brainstorming, socializing with other members.
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ELA in Uganda
The largest youth empowerment platform in Uganda
The programme operated within safe clubs set up in the community and opened five afternoons a week. The clubs were run by older girls, selected from the communities and trained to deliver life-skills and sexual and reproductive health education as well as mentor younger girls in exchange for a small lump-sum incentive.
In later years, livelihood training on income-generating activities and financial literacy was delivered by entrepreneurs and professionals for the senior out-of-school girls (above 15). After the training, they were eligible for a small loan to capitalise on their acquired skills. To further support girls, meetings with parents and village elders were organised periodically.
The largest youth empowerment platform in Uganda
24%
drop in fertility rates
30%
drop in having sex unwillingly
48%
increased engagement in income generating activities
45%
higher wage employment
More than 6 times increase
in self-employment earnings
Uganda has progressed at a slower pace in socio-economic empowerment of women compared to developed countries. Violence against women is more prevalent as they have limited control over their bodies. The majority of girls marry and have their first child at a young age. To contribute to their socio-economic empowerment through facilitation of their labour force participation and increase of sexual and reproductive health awareness, BRAC developed the largest youth empowerment platform in Uganda.
The ELA programme in Uganda draws on lessons learnt in Bangladesh where 9,000 clubs have been reaching over one million girls since 1993. With the support of BankNetherlands Partnership Programme, Africa Gender Innovation Lab, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), Mastercard, Nike, the World Bank and the IGC, BRAC Uganda implemented the ELA programme between 2008 and 2012. It served 50,000 in- and out-of-school girls 14 to 20 through 1,200 ELA clubs in 27 districts.
The programme operated within safe clubs set up in the community and opened five afternoons a week. The clubs were run by older girls, selected from the communities and trained to deliver life-skills and sexual and reproductive health education as well as mentor younger girls in exchange for a small lump-sum incentive.
In later years, livelihood training on income-generating activities and financial literacy was delivered by entrepreneurs and professionals for the senior out-of-school girls (above 15). After the training, they were eligible for a small loan to capitalise on their acquired skills. To further support girls, meetings with parents and village elders were organised periodically
The evidence from Uganda confirmed ELA intervention as transferable across countries, scalable and cost-effective with minor adjustments.
A central advantage of the approach is its potential to give a big push to adolescent girls’ empowerment along potentially interlinked dimensions and thus kick-start a virtuous cycle of growth. Future steps in the evaluation should include the analysis of the programme's components to understand the impacts of each and their possible complementarities.
Including fathers and men from the communities should be explored as it could potentially make short-term effects on girls’ aspirations or similar dimensions permanent.
A clustered randomised controlled trial (RCT) was applied to enroll 150
communities in rural regions of Iganga and Jinja and urban or semi-urban
regions of Kampala and Mukono into treatment (100) and control arms. A
total of 3,522 aged between 14-20 were tracked to the endline. The
programme’s impact on girls’ socio-economic outcomes was evaluated using
an ITT estimate.
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ELA in Sierra Leone
Countering the school-to-work transition for young women in high Ebola-disrupted villages
Operations are implemented in Bo district, two chiefdoms, and 10 communities, mentoring 300 girls between the ages 10-22. Adolescent clubs also serve as a social space for girls who learn and share their reproductive and sexual health issues and provide relevant learning materials and support recreational activities such as reading, dancing, and indoor and outdoor games.
The ELA programme draws on the lessons learnt in Bangladesh where 9,000 clubs have been reaching over one million girls since 1993. Designed for the pre-Ebola context, the programme operated through safe clubs set up in the villages and opened five afternoons a week. Senior girls from the community were trained to run the clubs and act as mentors. They hosted life-skills and SRH training which was the only component rolled-out before the Ebola.
Livelihood training on income-generating activities and financial literacy by entrepreneurs and professionals had to be postponed until 2015 when schools reopened. Girls above 17 benefited from vocational training and at 18 they were offered microfinance loans to capitalise on acquired skills.
Impact of ELA in high Ebola-disrupted villages, Sierra Leone
82% drop
of out-of-wedlock pregnancy
73%
of the reduction in literacy skills were offset by spending 10 hours more per week learning and nearly 5 hours less on chores.
50% reduction
in failure rate to re-enrol in school, post Ebola.
29% increase
in contraceptive use
Declining poverty rates across the world substantially reduced gender inequality and strengthened women’s agency by increasing access to education and labour markets. Yet, a range of persisting disadvantages puts these hard-earned gains in peril of being swiftly erased or even reversed by external shocks, as evidenced during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone.
BRAC uses an integrated approach to build a platform to voice young girls’ concerns and build their capacity to overcome the barriers by facilitating their labour force participation and increasing sexual and reproductive health awareness.
In partnership with IPA, the World Bank and UNICEF, BRAC implemented the ELA programme in Sierra Leone from 2014 to 2016. It served 4,800 in- and out-ofschool girls 12 to 25 through 160 ELA clubs in Port Loko, Kambia, Moyamba, and Pujehun.
The multifaceted ELA programme proved as a potential policy for promoting and protecting girls’ ability to choose and exert agency over their body even in times of severe socio-economic disruption.
The findings are broadly in consistent with the ELA evaluation in South Sudan (Buehren et al., 2017) during the 2013 civil war. Similarly, the ELA evaluation in Uganda (Bandiera et al., 2020) found model transferable across countries, scalable and cost-effective with minor adjustments.
For future studies, age-specific life-skills curricula could balance out results across cohorts while multiarm evaluation could deepen understanding of mechanisms through which ELA clubs deliver gains.
A randomised controlled trial (RCT) method enrolled 5,775 girls into control and treatment arms to assess the impact on their sexual and reproductive health, income, and sense of agency. To capture the considerable heterogeneity, findings were disaggregated by: (i) high and low (Ebola) disruption treatment areas and (ii) treatment younger (12-17) and older cohort (18-25) at the baseline.
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Sources
- Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Africa (Bandiera et al., 2020, AEJ, Vol. 12 (1), pp. 210-259)
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Last updated: 27 septiembre 2024