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September 2005, Vol. 11, No. 3 Transitions to Adulthood A program providing reproductive health education and livelihoods skills training to adolescent girls in the slums of Allahabad, India, has shown that such interventions are acceptable to parents, feasible to implement, and exert some positive influence on the circumstances of girls. However, investigators found that narrowly focused, short-duration programs may fail to make a broad impact on girls’ lives. The intervention also highlighted the difficulties inherent in fielding longitudinal surveys in urban slum areas. Girls’ lives circumscribed Given this situation, programs are needed that increase the ability of unmarried girls to have a say in their own lives and enhance the skills that expand life choices. “Livelihoods programs have the potential to increase young women’s decisionmaking power by building social networks and developing income-generating and savings skills,” says Council social scientist Mary P. Sebastian. As broadly conceived, the “livelihoods approach” to adolescent programs attempts to provide technical and life skills and seeks to transform the ways in which girls view themselves and the ways in which they are perceived by others in the community. Although a wide variety of livelihoods programs for adult women exist in India, few focus on adolescents. Of those that do, few employ rigorous scientific methods to evaluate the impact of the program. Testing feasibility and acceptability The pilot project integrated livelihoods activities for adolescent girls aged 14–19 into CARE’s reproductive health program for slum dwellers. Using a quasi-experimental study design, investigators divided the study area into an experimental and a control area. All adolescents taking part in the CARE program received reproductive health education from peer educators; only participants who lived in the experimental area, however, were provided with counseling on livelihoods, training in a range of vocational skills, assistance with opening savings accounts, and supportive follow- up counseling and assistance. Group sessions on reproductive health were held in both areas weekly for 7–10 weeks. Following completion of the reproductive health component, participants in the experimental area attended vocational training classes. Courses arranged by the project included tailoring, pot decoration, mehndi (painting of hands or feet), candle making, rug weaving, mending and embroidery, beekeeping, and food preservation. Over a span of ten months, 19 vocational courses were offered, each typically lasting 1–2 weeks, although some ran several months. Nearly 80 percent of participants completed two or more courses. Baseline and endline surveys measured the impact of the project by comparing changes in various behaviors and attitudes among adolescents in the control and experimental areas before and after the intervention. The underlying premise of the intervention was that multiple benefits can accrue from synthesizing economic, social, and reproductive health activities. Specifically, the investigators wanted to see whether girls’ physical mobility increased and whether they became more aware of safe places to gather with friends and mentors. Did they become more knowledgeable about reproductive health? Did their work aspirations blossom, and did they adopt more progressive ideas about gender roles? And finally, did they spend less time on domestic chores and more time visiting with friends, playing, or engaging in income-earning tasks? Findings from the baseline survey The researchers also found girls’ work lives to be substantially different from those of boys. Girls reported spending almost four times as many hours as boys on chores. The proportion of boys who reported that they have ever worked for pay was five times greater than the proportion of girls. However, despite the fact that girls were much less likely to work for pay, they were more inclined to save: 54 percent of girls and 26 percent of boys reported having some savings. Reproductive health knowledge of certain topics was low. For example, very few adolescents in the survey knew about the fertile period of a woman’s menstrual cycle, even though the large majority of girls and nearly 40 percent of boys reported that they knew about menstrual cycles in general. Although more than 90 percent of the respondents of both sexes reported knowing at least one contraceptive method, only about 33 percent of girls spontaneously reported knowing about condoms as compared with 82 percent of boys. Moreover, only about 37 percent of girls knew that condoms can protect against HIV/AIDS, as compared with 84 percent of boys. Evaluation of the project Despite its brevity, the project had some significant effects on adolescent girls in Allahabad. Girls in the experimental areas were significantly more likely than the matched control respondents to know about safe locations for unmarried women to congregate, to be a member of a group, score higher on a social skills index, be informed about reproductive health, and spend time on leisure activities. All of these measures closely reflected the content of the project. More than 80 percent of participants in the experimental area continued to use their vocational skills after the project ended. However, only 10 percent earned income from selling products that they made. One 19-yearold participant explained, “No one pays. I make things for free, without earning anything…. Women come and ask me to stitch clothes…[but] will not pay me.” This finding suggests that to undertake new economic activities, girls may need more support than can be provided during a brief intervention. Similarly, more than 50 percent of participants were able to open savings accounts in their name at the local post office, but there were significant obstacles to the continued operation of the accounts. The staff at the post office, who were male, frequently expressed their reluctance to assist adolescent girls. They often reprimanded girls for disturbing them, and sometimes even sent them away, asking them to return another day. As a result of these experiences, many girls were intimidated by the post office employees and were reluctant to spend money on repeated trips to the post office in order to manage their accounts. The endline data also revealed no significant change in many crucial aspects of girls’ lives. Levels of self-esteem remained unchanged, and girls in the experimental area were no more likely than girls in the control group to be able to visit relatives alone. Girls in the experimental area continued to hold rigid opinions about gender roles. Their aspirations for paid work in the future were no higher than those of girls in the control group. And they spent no more time with friends or on labor market work, nor less time on domestic chores, than did girls in the control group. “In retrospect, the duration of the intervention was too short and its approach was not intensive enough to produce a sizable effect,” said Population Council demographer Barbara Mensch, the investigation’s lead researcher. “The girls were not involved in group meetings or vocational training for a long enough period of time to alter their attitudes or behavior significantly. Also, the intervention had only minimal contact with the girls’ parents, who are largely in control of these girls’ lives and futures. These findings show that parents must be fully engaged in discussions of the importance of their daughters’ schooling, livelihoods, and delayed marriage.” Several lessons emerged from this pilot project. The intervention was both acceptable to parents in this traditional slum community and feasible to implement. Short-term projects such as this can increase awareness, social skills, knowledge of safe spaces, and group identification; however, they cannot be expected to alter the structure of opportunities available to adolescent girls. In order to reduce deeply entrenched gender disparities and enhance girls’ ability to influence their own lives, it would be desirable for future projects to spend considerably more time with participants and with key community members, including parents, bank and postal workers, and others. Sources Mensch, Barbara S., Monica J. Grant, Mary P. Sebastian, Paul C. Hewett, and Dale Huntington. 2004. “The effect of a livelihoods intervention in an urban slum in India: Do vocational counseling and training alter the attitudes and behavior of adolescent girls?” Policy Research Division Working Paper No. 194. New York: Population Council. (PDF) (abstract) Outside funding See Also
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