Empowering Girls in Rural Bangladesh

Adolescent girls in Bangladesh are seeing increased rates of enrollment in secondary school, but face high rates of drop out and early marriage, which curtail formal and informal skill acquisition. This study follows adolescent girls who took part in a program designed to strengthen academic education and nonacademic skills through different approaches. Midline results suggest that there are complementarities between approaches. An incentive to delay marriage successfully delayed marriage and helped girls stay in school, without impacting a wider range of capabilities. However, combing peer-led training and the incentive had an impact on schooling, math and literacy, and capabilities like negotiation and contraception knowledge. Preliminary evidence suggests that including savings clubs in the training curriculum successfully encouraged savings behavior, improved negotiation skills, and more surprisingly, delayed marriage and increased education. This study will follow these girls as they enter adulthood in order to carefully document the various influences on secondary schooling attainment and also to document the association between increased secondary schooling attainment that resulted from this program and adult economic activity, inter-household bargaining, fertility, and health.

*To learn more about key findings from this evaluation read Power vs Money: Alternative Approaches to Reducing Child Marriage in Bangladesh, a Randomized Control Trial