Practice-based solution
Adolescent development clubs 2
- Kenya
Solutions
Empowerment and Livelihood of Adolescents (ELA)
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.
This program is implemented by BRAC International, Netherlands, Bangladesh, Kenya
Published: 24 September 2024
1
Summary of the intervention
BRAC’s ELA programme builds self confidence, leadership, critical thinking, decision-making skills, and social skills.
Intervention type: |
Adolescent development clubs |
Assessment: |
Adolescent development clubs has been classified as EFFECTIVE |
INSPIRE pillar: |
Safe environments |
Evidence type: |
Evidenced-based solutions |
Participant in BRAC's ELA program, Sierra Leone. Image credit: BRAC International
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.
Adolescent development clubs has been classified as effective. See other examples of this type of intervention:
2
Quick facts about this 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.
The program outcomes:
Empowered, educated girls are better equipped to avoid child marriage, delay teenage pregnancy, and build healthier futures for themselves, their families, and their communities.
BRAC typically use a “near peer” mentoring model so youth learn and engage on these topics with community-based facilitators. Youth also explore gender dynamics and learn to navigate issues that affect their well-being and their futures, such as relationships, sexual and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, gender-based violence, early marriage, human and legal rights, and more. Image credit: BRAC International
3
Origins of the program
A karate class from the Adolescent Development Program (ADP), Bangladesh. Image credit: BRAC UK
The Adolescent Development Program (ADP), Bangladesh
The Empowerment and Livelihood of Adolescents (ELA) program originally began as the Adolescent Development Program (ADP) in Bangladesh in 1998. As of 2008 it has since expanded outside of Bangladesh to Nepal and five African countries as the ELA program: Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Liberia.
ELA grew out as a combination of several ADP interventions done in Bangladesh with other interventions added according to the country context.
Adolescent Development Program (ADP), Bangladesh. Image credit: BRAC International
4
Program overview
Through ELA, girls who have dropped out of school, and are at the risk of early marriage or pregnancy, can access life skills, financial literacy, vocational and entrepreneurial training, including in-kind startup capital, and are supported with linkages to work opportunities. Image credit: BRAC International
“ 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
Image credit: BRAC International
Opportunity for a better life
The ELA program 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, aged between 10-22, and the participants can be both in school and out of school, with the majority being out of school. ELA in Africa works independently from the public education system, but works closely with the national ministries of youth and gender.
ELA starts 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.
There is 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.
ELA also incorporates sports, reading, games, and socialising into the programs to build a network of supportive peers. Programs are age appropriate, with content tailored for very young adolescents (10-14), adolescents (15-19), and youth (20 and above). This foundation in life skills helps prepare young people to become strong, resilient, adaptable adults. Image credit: BRAC International.
In Tanzania, Grassroots Soccer collaborated with BRAC to offer the ELA programme for adolescent girls alongside a soccer intervention for boys. Goal-setting activities in the ELA program improved sexual and reproductive health outcomes for girls, and engaging young men in the soccer intervention reduced girls’ reports of intimate partner violence. Image credit: BRAC International.
5
ELA in Uganda
Education with dancing in an ELA workshop, Uganda. Image credit: BRAC International
The largest youth empowerment platform in Uganda
The programme targets girls who have dropped out of school, and are at the risk of early marriage or pregnancy. It operated adolescent clubs - safe spaces run by older girls selected from the communities. They are rained to deliver life-skills and sexual and reproductive health education, as well as mentor younger girls in exchange for a small lump-sum incentive. The clubs opened five afternoons a week.
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 impact of ELA, 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
> 6 x
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 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.
A girl reads a story book with lessons on life skills at an ELA club in Uganda. Image credit: BRAC International.
6
ELA in Sierra Leone
Participants in Sierra Leone dancing in an ELA workshop. Image credit: BRAC International
Countering the school-to-work transition for young women in high Ebola-disrupted villages
Adolescent clubs operated in 10 communities, mentoring 300 girls between the ages 10-22. These 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 sexual reproductive health training which was the only component rolled-out before the Ebola.
This intervention bundled health education, vocational skills training, and micro-credit. Concurrently, the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic led to school closures across Sierra Leone. While girls experienced higher teen pregnancy and lower school attendance post-Ebola, ELA clubs mitigated many of these negative effects of epidemic-spurred school closures. Girls above 17 benefited from vocational training and at 18 they were offered microfinance loans to capitalise on acquired skills.
The clubs protected human capital accumulation, which is pivotal for future labour market opportunities.
Impact of ELA in high Ebola-disrupted villages, Sierra Leone
82% drop of out-of-wedlock pregnancy
This significant impact was possible not only because of what the girls learnt through the lifeskills training, but also because of the way they spent their time during the Ebola crisis. Both older and younger ELA girls spent on average 3 hours a week in ELA clubs which made them allocate around 2 hours a week more away from men.
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
In Sierra Leone, women frequently face gender-based violence and exploitation, experiencing physical, sexual, or emotional abuse by a husband or partner. Sierra Leone is also one of the least equal countries in the UNDP Gender Equality index and has the highest maternal mortality rate of any country. Even among those not married, early pregnancy is a significant risk factor. This can limit girls’ career opportunities, as only a minority of elders believe that women should be allowed to continue schooling when pregnant.
West Africa’s 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic had the potential to further exacerbate girls’ risk of pregnancy, sexual abuse, and school dropout. About half of all cases during the epidemic came from Sierra Leone, and the country closed all primary and secondary schools during the 2014-2015 academic year. These closures had the potential to both reduce girls’ education and increase their exposure to older men.
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.
The drop in enrolment for girls who lived in high Ebola-related disruption communities was cut by half if they had been exposed to ELA clubs, and they see their numeracy and literacy levels improve. Image credit: George Lewis/The World Bank
BRAC ELA workshop Port Loko, Sierra Leone. Image credit: NextBillion.net
BRAC ELA program participants in Sierra Leone. Image credit BRAC International.
7
Sources
- BRAC and BRAC International by Global Education Innovation Initiative, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
- BRAC International - Youth empowerment
- BRAC - Empowering adolescent girls
- Independent Evaluation and Research Cell brief: Impact of the ELA programme in Uganda
- Independent Evaluation and Research Cell brief: The economic lives of young women in the time of Ebola: Lessons from an empowerment programme
- Poverty Action Lab: ELA in Sierra Leone
- Adolescent empowerment at scale: Successes and challenges of an evidence-based approach to young women’s programming in Africa
Uganda:
- Women’s Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Africa (Bandiera et al., 2020, AEJ, Vol. 12 (1), pp. 210-259)
Sierra Leone:
- The Economic Lives of Young Women in the Time of Ebola: Lessons from an Empowerment Programme (Bandiera et al., 2019, World Bank Working Paper No. 8760)
8
Tags
Last updated: 24 September 2024