Suchergebnisse

The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) intervention was conducted over two years to support more than 11,000 vulnerable adolescent girls in Zambia. It was led by the Population Council in partnership with the Young Women's Christian Association of Zambia (YWCA), the National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia (Natsave), and the Government of Zambia. To assess the impact of AGEP on mediating and longer-term demographic, reproductive, and health outcomes, Population Council researchers designed and implemented a longitudinal, cluster randomized controlled trial across all program areas. This brief presents the final AGEP findings, highlighting, in the Zambian context, what can be changed for girls through a girl-level intervention that focuses on building social, health, and economic assets. The program was successfully able to improve sexual and reproductive health knowledge and self-efficacy, however, additional interventions are needed to: 1) address social and cultural norms on girls' education, rights, and values at the household, school, and community levels; and 2) address the underlying economic constraints that might prevent girls from participating and/or fully benefiting from the program.

Adolescence is a critical period in the lives of young people and potentially a time to reap lasting benefits from interventions that improve general, sexual, nutritional, and maternal and child health. The government of Zambia is committed to improving the nutritional status of adolescents and pregnant women and their children. Nonetheless, adolescent girls in Zambia remain at risk for macro- and micro-nutrient deficiencies that have deleterious effects on growth, development, and maternal and child health. The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) nutritional curriculum, developed in partnership with PATH, was tailored to provide age-appropriate information and covered six sessions on nutrition. This brief summarizes the impact of the nutrition curriculum on nutrition outcomes of adolescents and their children one year after the AGEP program ended. The results of this rigorous randomized evaluation indicate that the AGEP nutrition training component with context-relevant participatory and interactive educational sessions did not improve adolescent or child nutritional outcomes.

This Testify article features a conversation about the emancipatory potentials and pitfalls of girls empowerment as practiced, experienced, and judged by Sierra Leonean activists. We – two scholars and four activists – discussed views on and experiences of girls empowerment approaches that have been interpreted in critical scholarly literature as a form of neoliberal responsibilization. Also within this critical literature, there is often the notion that these approaches may yet create openings for emancipatory agency and counter-conduct. However, it remains unclear whether this happens and to what extent. Our conversation centres activists' views on the academic critique of girls empowerment and raises a number of questions, including: Why do many feminist activists in Sierra Leone embrace girls empowerment approaches? What do they see in them? How do they interpret and practice them? Where do they see potentials and pitfalls? And what is the role of donors?

The Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program (AGEP) is a four-year effort to support more than 11,000 of the most vulnerable adolescent girls in Zambia. AGEP was led by the Population Council, in partnership with the Young Women's Christian Association of Zambia, the National Savings and Credit Bank of Zambia, and the Government of Zambia. The program design was based on the asset-building framework which posits that if girls are able to build social, health, and economic assets in the short term, there will be longer-term dividends on health and education outcomes. This brief reports on midterm findings of the study which raise many questions about the interplay between established social norms and interventions that are new to these girls and their communities. They suggest that the direct-to-girls platform, while a necessary component of reaching vulnerable girls, is not sufficient in the Zambian context to overcome the range of individual, household, and community-level factors preventing a safe, healthy, and productive transition into adulthood.

AbstractThis Testify article features a conversation about the emancipatory potentials and pitfalls of girls empowerment as practiced, experienced, and judged by Sierra Leonean activists. We – two scholars and four activists – discussed views on and experiences of girls empowerment approaches that have been interpreted in critical scholarly literature as a form of neoliberal responsibilization. Also within this critical literature, there is often the notion that these approaches may yet create openings for emancipatory agency and counter-conduct. However, it remains unclear whether this happens and to what extent. Our conversation centres activists' views on the academic critique of girls empowerment and raises a number of questions, including: Why do many feminist activists in Sierra Leone embrace girls empowerment approaches? What do they see in them? How do they interpret and practice them? Where do they see potentials and pitfalls? And what is the role of donors?

In 2017, the AADC dialogues focus on how Asian countries are tackling the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through their cooperation programs. The first conference in Manila (May) explored planned urbanization and the New Urban Agenda (SDG 11) while the second meeting in Ulaanbaatar (September) discussed women and girls' empowerment (SDG 5). This report covers the proceedings and outcomes of the Ulaanbaatar meeting, featuring presentations and discussions by development experts, innovators, activists and practitioners from governments, companies, academia, NGOs, and multilateral organizations across Asia.

Intro -- Imagining Black Womanhood -- Contents -- Figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Girls Empowerment Project -- 2. Controlling "The Urban Girl" -- 3. GEP's Emergent Culture of Empowerment -- 4. GEP's Organizational Structure and Power Matrix -- 5. Africentric Womanist Femininity Meets Decent Girl Femininity -- 6. Dance Lessons -- Conclusion -- Appendix -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

Drawing on participatory research in a high school implementing single-sex classes, this article demonstrates how single-sex education masks racialized economic inequality by framing low academic achievement among low-income youth of color as a function of gender, thereby scapegoating girls for a supposed "boy crisis" in education. We demonstrate this with data collected by and from students, as well as from educators and parents, delineating how girls of color were held accountable for boys' sexual and even academic behavior. We argue that this misattribution of blame succeeds by capitalizing on entrenched gender roles that cast girls/women as responsible for boys/men and on neoliberal rhetoric trumpeting postfeminist, commercialized "girl power" and the virtue of personal responsibility. We focus particularly on how girls' supposed newfound empowerment is folded into the long-standing discourse of girl blame by posing girl power as a problem for boys.