Empowering Adolescent Girls: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Sierra Leone

Pregnancy and early childbearing can limit teenage girls' human capital accumulation and labor force participation. At the same time, a lack of skills and limited labor market opportunities increase teenage girls' financial dependency on men, possibly leading to pregnancy and early child bearing. Breaking the vicious circle requires understanding which factors sustain it. This project, in collaboration with BRAC, provide alternative bundles of health education, vocational skills training, and micro-credit to adolescent girls in 200 communities in Sierra Leone, where, like many African countries, teenage pregnancy rates are high and girls' labor force participation is low. The intervention and data collection are designed to shed new light on the interplay between reproductive choices and labor market performance of young women in low income countries, and to help pinpoint the key underlying constraints that prevent girls from accumulating human capital and successfully transitioning to productive employment.

*To learn more about key findings from this evaluation read Do School Closures During an Epidemic have Persistent Effects? Evidence from Sierra Leone in the Time of Ebola