Building on 15 years of evidence to empower 1.2 million young women in Africa by 2026

• In Event: Scale is Necessary: Evidence-based Approaches to Youth Empowerment and Skilling

Proposal

In the context of recovery from a global pandemic, there is mounting urgency to support adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) living in poverty. AGYW are experiencing increased pressure to engage in work and transactional relationships; early pregnancy and child/forced marriages have increased; and economies are struggling to recover from COVID-19, affecting food security, availability of school fees, and rates of violence. This combination of events creates a challenging set of barriers for AGYW to overcome. Solutions require multidimensional and integrated approaches that are deliverable at scale.

BRAC has more than 50 years of experience implementing integrated, holistic programming in several countries across Asia and Africa. The positive impacts of Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA), BRAC’s signature youth empowerment model, in Uganda, which included a 48% rise in income generation and a 34% drop in teen pregnancy in villages with ELA clubs, led to the expansion of ELA in other countries such as Tanzania, Liberia, Nepal, and the Philippines. In South Sudan and Sierra Leone, ELA was also proven to be effective in offsetting the impact of disasters such as conflict and the Ebola epidemic.

Through a large, multi-country partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, BRAC is building on these experiences and evidence to scale its holistic programming for young people across seven countries in East and West Africa. Mastercard Foundation Accelerating Impact for Young Women in Partnership with BRAC – or AIM – is a multi-faceted, seven-country program designed to equip 1.2 million adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in Africa with age-appropriate entrepreneurship, employability, and life-skills training, along with the tools to start and scale their businesses. Leveraging BRAC’s microfinance footprint and community networks as both the base and accelerator for social and economic interventions to operate at scale, the AIM initiative intends to achieve three main objectives- foster the agency and voice of AGYW to act on their aspirations; enable AGYW to engage in sustainable livelihoods; and create an enabling environment for AGYW, including support for their engagement in advocacy. In addition to AIM, BRAC continues to test iterations of ELA including ELA in Schools, an IVR version of ELA called BRAC Girls Talk, and partnerships with other organizations.

Evidence indicates that programs focusing on narrower outcomes do not address the multitude of constraints young women face (Banks, 2014). There is already strong evidence that many of BRAC’s multifaceted interventions, such as the Ultra-Poor Graduation; Microfinance; ELA; Agriculture, Food Security, and Livelihoods Program; and Skills Development Program, promote sustainable and resilient livelihoods for young women to achieve long-term impact. Evidence of effectiveness, however, does not inevitably translate to successful scaling of impactful approaches. Quality of implementation can easily be compromised when delivering complex, multilayered programs at scale, which BRAC experienced in Tanzania in an early iteration of ELA where an initial RCT failed to show impact. In this panel, BRAC will highlight the necessity of strong systems, quality oversight and adaptation for context when scaling including how we engage communities, test, iterate, and use evidence for change.

Author

• Scott MacMillan, BRAC International