Evaluation report
Empowering adolescent girls: does it take a village?
Alison Andrew, Sonya Krutikova, Gabriela Smarrelli, Hemlata Verma ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study tested two approaches to empowering adolescent girls in India: one targeting girls alone, and another that also engaged community members who enforce gender norms. Both approaches reduced school dropout and early marriage. However, only the community engagement approach improved girls' mental health, by shifting gender norms to be more progressive and reducing social sanctions against girls who break norms.
Key points
- Both interventions reduced school dropout and early marriage for adolescent girls
- Only the community engagement arm produced large improvements in girls' mental health
- Community engagement led to more progressive gender norms and reduced severity of sanctions
- Both girls and their mothers perceived shifts in community norms and sanctions
- Engaging norm enforcers appears critical for meaningful improvements in girls' well-being in settings with restrictive gender norms
Limitations
The document does not specify the sample size, duration of follow-up, or provide detailed quantitative results for the outcomes measured. It is unclear whether the study measured longer-term sustainability of changes or effects on other dimensions of girls' well-being beyond school attendance, marriage, and mental health.
Abstract
Striking gender gaps persist in fundamental aspects of human welfare. In India, the setting of this paper, these gaps are particularly large. Interventions often target adolescent girls with the aim of empowering them to make choices that go against the status quo - to remain in school longer or marry later, for example. This approach may inadvertently expose girls, who are often marginalized within their communities, to new risks if it encourages them to violate prevailing gender norms. In this study, we design an experiment to compare the effectiveness of targeting only adolescent girls with an approach that additionally engages with the enforcers of gender norms in the wider community. We find that both arms of the trial led to a reduction in school dropout and early marriage. We see large improvements in girls' mental health but only in the arm which engages with the wider community. Improvements in mental health can be explained by community engagement causing gender norms to become more progressive and causing a reduction in the severity of sanctions that girls face for breaking norms. Both adolescent girls and their mothers perceived these shifts in norms and sanctions. Our results demonstrate that in settings where unequal outcomes are sustained through restrictive gender norms, change in the attitudes and behavior of the enforcers of these norms is critical for achieving meaningful improvements in women's well-being.