Adolescent girls' life skills program in Nigeria

In low and middle-income countries, women's agency has been and continues to be constrained, leading to lower levels of human capital compared with men. Barriers to women’s agency limit their capacity to advocate for investments in themselves, resulting in fewer years of education, more limited labor force participation, and earlier marriages than their male counterparts. To address this, the Government of Nigeria, in partnership with the World Bank, initiated the Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment (AGILE) program to improve girls’ education and empowerment, including through life skills training. Previous efforts by J-PAL Africa, funded by other J-PAL initiatives, have leveraged existing evidence on life skills programs, to shape the design of the life skills component of AGILE in line with local contextual needs. This next phase seeks to learn from program implementation by complementing existing quantitative data collection efforts with qualitative, costing, and monitoring data.