Mitigating the effects of COVID-19 on girls’ enrolment in school through life skills interventions in Nigeria

J-PAL Africa and J-PAL affiliated professor Manisha Shah will work together with the Katsina State Government in Nigeria to develop and pilot a life skills programme, as part of the World Bank’s Adolescent Girls Initiative for Learning and Empowerment, with the objective of mitigating the increase in female secondary school dropouts due to COVID-19. To build an evidence-based life skills pilot programme, J-PAL Africa and Manisha Shah will (a) synthesize and codify evidence on a life skills into an implementation toolkit that can be used to think through programme design, (b) conduct a needs assessment in Katsina state to understand the local challenges faced by girls in accessing education, and finally (c) use the toolkit and needs assessment to support the design of a globally informed, locally grounded life skills programme. The programme will be trialed in 160 schools in Katsina in 2021, aiming to scale across all schools within a 5-year time range, potentially reaching up to 150,000 girls. The programme could also be used to inform the development of life skills programmes in seven other states in northern Nigeria for a total of around 800,000 girls in 5,000 schools.