Decoding youth empowerment programs: How and when (not) to combine soft and hard skills for maximum impact

• In Event: What do Youth Need to Succeed? Multi-Country Evidence on the Efficacy of Skill Development for Youth Livelihood Success

Proposal

Using the astounding RCT results from the BRAC ELA program in Uganda as a baseline in terms of the mix of skills (soft and financial) needed for social and financial empowerment, we will present on our experiences decoupling life skills from livelihood training across our adolescent development/youth skills programming in Africa and Asia to provide insight into the following questions: Does the provision of life skills training by itself lead to improved empowerment? Does social empowerment need to go hand in hand with economic empowerment in order to achieve intended results? Can economic empowerment be reached through training alone, or does it need to be complemented with access to credit?

We will open the presentation by delving into existing research around the effectiveness of combining life skills and livelihood training in Uganda. In that study, we found that relative to adolescents in control communities, after two years the intervention raised the likelihood that girls engage in income generating activities by 72% (driven by increased self-employment), and raised their expenditure on private consumption goods by 38%. At endline of the study, girls in the program were 90% more likely to be self-employed than girls not in the program. These improvements in self-employment outcomes were directly linked to the change in girls’ entrepreneurship capabilities: girls in the program perceived themselves as having better entrepreneurial skills than girls not in the program in terms of being able to run a business, identify business opportunities, obtain and manage capital, manage employees, bargain over input and output prices, and protect assets & collect debts. Additionally, the entrepreneurship and self-employment improvements were accompanied by improvements in health outcomes for the girls. Teen pregnancy fell by 26%, and early entry into marriage/cohabitation fell by 58%. Strikingly, the share of girls reporting sex against their will dropped from 14% to almost half that level and aspired ages at marriage and childbearing both moved forward.

We will then use those results as a spring board to discuss our experience offering exclusively life skills in Bangladesh and Sierra Leone and job training in Uganda and Bangladesh. We will end the presentation by providing some contextual and comparative insight for when/where combining social and financial empowerment skills may not be as successful as it was in the sub-Saharan context.

Author

• Aissatou Diallo, BRAC USA