PROJECT
Ethiopia "Brain Trust": Building Best Practices for Rural Girls’ Programming

The status of girls in rural Ethiopia is arguably as low as that of any group in the world. Girls in Ethiopia are significantly less likely than Ethiopian boys to attend school, and they attain much lower levels of education when they do attend. Rural Ethiopian girls frequently are given in arranged marriages during childhood or early adolescence. These marriages often involve forced sexual initiation, early childbearing, and heightened risk of poor outcomes, including fistula. Despite the difficulties they face, there are few programs specifically for these girls.

The goal of this project, funded by the Nike Foundation, is to expand and improve programs for rural girls in Ethiopia. The Population Council is assembling a team of the most energetic, committed practitioners of programming for rural girls in Ethiopia—a girls' programming "Brain Trust." Under the project, which began in October 2007, Brain Trust members will make four visits each year to programs for rural girls and identify best practices and lessons learned from each program. The lessons learned may include approaches to be avoided as well as strategies to be emulated. The best practices and lessons learned from the site visits will be packaged into a user-friendly toolkit that other practitioners can use to establish, expand, and/or improve programs for rural girls. Brain Trust members will also host annual national workshops on programming for rural girls.

The Population Council expects that the efforts of Brain Trust members will boost the profile of rural girls in Ethiopia and increase the attention paid to the conditions they face, which should in turn result in additional funding for rural girls' programs and encourage more organizations to target efforts to this highly marginalized population. In addition, the Brain Trust project will make grants directly to local organizations for establishing or expanding of innovative programs for rural girls.

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Location

Ethiopia

Duration

October 2007–September 2010

Population Council researchers

Elshaday Kifle, Annabel Erulkar, Emil Parker

Donor

Nike Foundation

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See Also

• Ethiopia
• Transitions to Adulthood

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