Peer-reviewed article
“ANZANSI Program Taught Me Many Things in Life”: Families’ Experiences with a Combination Intervention to Prevent Adolescent Girls’ Unaccompanied Migration for Labor
Ozge Sensoy Bahar, Alice Boateng, Portia Buernarkie Nartey, Abdallah Ibrahim, Kingsley Kumbelim et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how families in Ghana's Northern region responded to ANZANSI, a program combining economic support and family strengthening to prevent adolescent girls from migrating alone to cities for child labor. Researchers interviewed 20 girls and their caregivers who participated in the program. Families found the program acceptable, easy to participate in, and believed it would be effective at keeping girls from migrating for work.
Key points
- Participants reported low burden and low opportunity costs associated with the intervention
- Both adolescent girls and caregivers showed positive attitudes toward the program
- Participants perceived the intervention as effective in reducing migration risk
- High self-efficacy was reported among participants
- The study provides foundation for a larger randomized trial
Limitations
This is a small qualitative study of only 20 families' experiences with the program, so findings reflect acceptability perceptions rather than whether the intervention actually prevents migration. The study does not measure whether girls who participated were less likely to migrate compared to those who did not participate.
Abstract
Approximately 160 million children work as child laborers globally, 39% of whom are female. Ghana is one of the countries with the highest rates of child labor. Child labor has serious health, mental health, and educational consequences, and those who migrate independently for child labor are even at higher risk. Yet, evidence-based efforts to prevent unaccompanied child migration are limited. In this study, we examined the acceptability of a family-level intervention, called ANZANSI (resilience in local language) combining two evidence-based interventions, a family economic empowerment intervention and a multiple family group family strengthening intervention, to reduce the risk factors associated with the independent migration of adolescent girls from the Northern region to big cities in Ghana. We conducted semi-structured interviews separately with 20 adolescent girls and their caregivers who participated in ANZANSI. Interviews were conducted in the local language and transcribed and translated verbatim. Informed by the theoretical framework of acceptability, the data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The results showed high intervention acceptability among both adolescent girls and their caregivers, including low burden, positive affective attitude, high perceived effectiveness, low opportunity costs, and high self-efficacy. The study findings underline the high need for such interventions in low-resource contexts in Ghana and provide the foundation for testing this intervention in a larger randomized trial.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- ANZANSI program combining family economic empowerment intervention and multiple family group family strengthening intervention
- Population
- Adolescent girls and their caregivers from Northern region of Ghana at risk of unaccompanied migration for labor
Key finding
High intervention acceptability among both adolescent girls and caregivers