Safe spaces for teenage girls in a time of crisis

Editor’s note: This is an updated version of a previous VoxDev article.

Adolescence is a pivotal time for girls. As personalities and priorities evolve during adolescence, it is a critical stage to create pathways for healthy and productive adulthoods. Adolescent girls face unique barriers that restrict their horizons. This includes concurrent labour market and fertility decisions, and limited access to formal education. Of the world's 130 million out-of-school youth, 70% are girls. It’s critical that interventions targeting adolescent girls address the constraints they face. 

The onset of the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone: Empowering adolescent girls in a crisis context 

Our study is based around an evaluation of a club-based intervention for young women implemented during the epidemic. Just after baseline data collection, and as programme implementation commenced, the Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016 hit Sierra Leone, as well as neighbouring countries, with disastrous consequences. In Sierra Leone alone, over 14,000 cases were confirmed and nearly 4,000 people lost their lives to the disease. Only recently, advances in finding an effective treatment for the often-deadly disease have been made. Therefore, efforts to combat the crisis focused on containing the spread of the disease and vast amounts of national and international resources were mobilised.

The Sierra Leonean government-imposed quarantines, limited travel, curbed market activities, and closed schools for the academic year. Additionally, health budgets were reallocated to prioritise spending on caring for patients and preventing the spread of the epidemic. As a result, economic activity slowed down, girls were not able to go to school, and medical services for sexual and reproductive health were severely reduced.

Evaluating the Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents programme 

These considerations were at the core of our evaluation of the Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents (ELA) programme, implemented by BRAC in Sierra Leone (Bandiera et al. 2024). The programme centres around clubs where adolescent girls, 12 to 25 years old, regularly meet outside of school. In these clubs, the girls socialise and receive life skills training – with topics ranging from reproductive health to leadership – as well as vocational training, with course offerings tailored to the local market. The safe space provided by the clubs also allows the girls to spend time away from men, reducing the likelihood of early pregnancy.

Our evaluation of the programme in Sierra Leone follows an earlier four-year study in Uganda (Bandiera et al. 2020). The findings from Uganda showed impressive impacts: girls were more likely to work and stay in school, which means they earned enough money to buy their own air time, hair care, and other personal expenses. They were much less likely to have a child or to have had sex against their will. They also had more progressive views on gender roles.

Given the results in Uganda, the Sierra Leone study was initially designed using a multi-arm randomised control trial (RCT) in collaboration with BRAC. However, considering the circumstances in Sierra Leone at the onset of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the study pivoted from its original goal of disaggregating the impacts of individual programme components to how well the ELA clubs help protect adolescent girls in a crisis environment.

Ebola’s impact on education, income and reproductive outcomes

The empirical analysis is based on a panel dataset containing information from nearly 2,700 adolescent girls aged 12-18 who were tracked over the two-year period during the Ebola epidemic. We focus on studying the causal chain of outcomes that form this link: time spent with men engaging in sexual activities, teen pregnancy, and re-enrollment back into school post-epidemic. 

We find that in control villages where schools were closed during the Ebola epidemic, young women faced significant adverse outcomes. The study found that the likelihood of teenage pregnancies increased, with the rate rising from 13% pre-epidemic to 19% during the epidemic. Additionally, school enrolment rates dropped post-epidemic, falling from 72% to 59%. A strong correlation was observed between pregnancy and school dropout, as only 15% of girls who became pregnant during the epidemic re-enrolled in school once they reopened.

The data from control villages also highlights the significance of safe spaces for adolescent girls during crises in Sierra Leone. Peripheral Health Units (PHUs), which provide adolescent-friendly spaces, played a crucial role in protecting girls from pregnancy risks during the Ebola epidemic. Villages that experienced Peripheral Health Unit closures saw a 70% increase in pregnancy rates, particularly out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and a decrease in school enrolment by 20 percentage points.

Results: Empowerment programmes buffer the adverse effects of crises

In this context, the ELA clubs may play a crucial role in helping to alleviate the effects of the crisis on adolescent girls and that is what we find:

• The ELA clubs significantly reduced out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates by 3.2 percentage points (23%) among teenage girls in treated villages, highlighting the protective impact of these safe spaces during the Ebola epidemic. 
• Girls in villages with ELA clubs reallocated their time, spending an average of 3.2 hours per week at the clubs, which corresponded to a 17% reduction in time spent with men, reducing their exposure to pregnancy risks. 
• In high-risk villages where Peripheral Health Units were closed, ELA clubs mitigated the increase in pregnancy rates by about half, especially for out-of-wedlock pregnancies, effectively offsetting the heightened risks faced during the crisis. 
• ELA clubs did not significantly impact school enrolment overall, but in high-risk villages, the protective effects of ELA clubs nearly offset the decline in school enrolment, ensuring girls returned to school post-epidemic. 
• The safe space component of the ELA intervention, rather than the additional vocational training or microfinance components, was critical in protecting girls during the crisis, emphasising the importance of maintaining safe spaces for vulnerable adolescents in times of crisis.

How empowerment programmes can buffer girls from the adverse effects of crises

These results show how policy interventions can be effective even in the face of large-scale shocks such as the Ebola crises we also saw in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, or the more recent COVID pandemic, as well as other shocks constraining economic and social life. In the case described in this article, the ELA programme that supported girls through a simple life skills and livelihood training buffered the girls from the adverse effects of the crisis. Preliminary analysis from an impact evaluation of the ELA programme in South Sudan suggests similar crisis-offsetting effects. This finding is particularly intriguing given that the nature of the aggregate shock, conflict in the case of South Sudan, differs between the two evaluations and the crisis occurred after a more sustained period of implementation in South Sudan. Such findings will become increasingly important as nearly all low-income states are susceptible to such shocks, be they through commodity price fluctuations, conflict, viral epidemics or climate change.

References

Bandiera, O, N Buehren, M Goldstein, I Rasul and A Smurra (2024) “Safe Spaces for Teenage Girls in a Time of Crisis", Working Paper.

Bandiera O, N Buehren, R Burgess, M Goldstein, S Gulesci, I Rasul, and M Sulaiman (2020), "Women's empowerment in action: Evidence from a randomized control trial in Africa," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 12(1): 210–260.