Peer-reviewed article
Mitigating Vulnerability of Adolescent Girls via Innovative Usage of Digital Technologies: Insights from a Field Trial
Chiranjeeb Ghosh, Sanjoy Paul, Nataraj Kuntagod, Anutosh Maitra, Indrani Bhattacharya ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001India has 365 million adolescents and young adults, but adolescent girls remain vulnerable to problems like child marriage, labour, pregnancy, and trafficking despite government spending on education, health, and nutrition programmes. The authors argue that addressing these vulnerabilities requires integrated, converged programmes across multiple sectors rather than isolated interventions in each area. They describe G-Power, a digital solution designed to provide a comprehensive view of individual girls' vulnerabilities and help stakeholders intervene early. A field trial of this approach was conducted in two districts of West Bengal.
Key points
- Adolescent girls in India face persistent vulnerabilities including child marriage, child labour, child pregnancy, and trafficking
- Vertical programmes in education, health, nutrition and protection delivered in isolation are insufficient to address vulnerability
- A converged approach analysing data across multiple domains can provide a 360-degree view of individual girls and predict vulnerability
- G-Power is a digital solution designed to enable early intervention and provide insights for programme improvement at village, block and district levels
- Field trial was conducted in two districts of West Bengal
Limitations
This document is a paper abstract or introduction that describes the G-Power digital system and its rationale, but does not provide detailed findings, outcome data, or results from the field trial. We cannot assess the effectiveness of the intervention or the robustness of the evidence from this excerpt alone.
Abstract
Adolescents and young adults, between the ages of 10 to 24, comprise approximately 30 percent of India’s population. These youths, 365 million strong, will shape the future of the nation. Although the Government of India has been spending enormous amount of money in a relentless manner over decades and the current cohorts of youth are healthier and better educated than ever before, the fact of the matter is, vulnerabilities still persist for adolescent girls (World Bank, 2014). We argue in this paper that vulnerability of adolescent girls cannot be dealt with by executing verticals programmes in Education, Health, Nutrition and Protection in isolation rather it needs to be handled by running these programmes in a converged manner. The comprehensive reports and analysis of data across these domains would provide a 360-degree view of individual girls, predicting their potential vulnerability well ahead of time, thereby enabling the stakeholders to intervene and prevent untoward incidents like child marriage, child labour, child pregnancy, and trafficking among others. Furthermore, insights generated from analysing the data from the field can be used to identify the areas of improvement for the programme as applicable to decision makers at different levels of societal structure starting with villages to blocks to districts. This paper describes a digital solution called G-Power that comprehensively addresses the above challenges, and shares insights from a field trial carried out in two districts of West Bengal in India. Keywords: mobility, social welfare, vulnerability assessment
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- G-Power: a digital solution providing comprehensive vulnerability assessment across education, health, nutrition and protection domains to enable early intervention
- Population
- Adolescent girls in two districts of West Bengal, India
Key finding
The paper describes the G-Power system design and rationale but does not provide quantified outcome data