Search results

Girls around the world face daunting challenges when it comes to enrolling in primary school, completing secondary school, and gaining the basic knowledge and skills they need to be empowered, healthy, and productive adults. Many governments and organizations have risen to meet that challenge through policies and programs designed to remove common barriers to girls' education. But as the number of actors in this space grows, and resources to address these challenges remain scarce, it is essential to ensure that investments are targeted toward the most effective policies and programs. This brief lays out the basics of program evaluation. The goal is to provide practitioners, policymakers, donors, and advocates working in girls' education with basic tools to critically assess and integrate evidence into decisions about program and policy design and advocacy messages.

Through the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), governments committed to achieving universal secondary school completion, including eliminating gender disparities, by 2030. The period from 1997 to 2014 saw considerable progress in closing gender gaps in school enrollment and attainment in many, but not all, low- and middle-income countries. However, as this research brief explains, claims that gender parity in primary education now exists are premature, especially in the poorest countries and new gender gaps, or gender-related challenges, may emerge as attainment increases. Moreover, the extremely low levels of secondary school enrollment—and even moreso completion—demonstrate that the SDG target of universal secondary school completion is likely more aspirational than realistic without dramatic increases in investments in education in these settings. The report concludes that improvements in the overall quality of education systems have proven even more elusive than improvements in attainment and gender parity, to the detriment of both boys and girls.

While insufficient to meet the vast needs, billions of dollars are being invested in girls' education advocacy, program, and policy solutions around the world. At the same time, hundreds of millions are invested in research about what works in education. And yet, the policies and approaches that are pursued often don't line up with what researchers find is effective. The result is that governments, international organizations, and NGOs are too often investing scarce resources in policies or interventions without knowing whether they work. In partnership with Echidna Giving, the GIRL Center at the Population Council developed the Evidence for Gender and Education Resource (EGER), an interactive online database that practitioners, researchers, donors, and decisionmakers can use to drive better results for girls, boys, and communities around the world. EGER addresses how to ensure that limited resources are invested in the most effective solutions to achieve gender equality in education. The resulting data provide valuable insights into gaps and opportunities for the global girls' education field, and this report shares those insights.

While insufficient to meet the vast needs, billions of dollars are being invested in girls' education advocacy, program, and policy solutions around the world. At the same time, hundreds of millions are invested in research about what works in education. And yet, the policies and approaches that are pursued often don't line up with what researchers find is effective. The result is that governments, international organizations, and NGOs are too often investing scarce resources in policies or interventions without knowing whether they work. As noted in this report summary, the Girls' Education Roadmap shares insights derived from data in the Evidence for Gender and Education Resource (EGER). The report reviews thousands of studies and assesses hundreds of organizations to figure out who's doing what, what's working where, and what are the biggest needs facing girls. The goals were to make sure governments, NGOs, and donors are investing in what works and to make sure researchers are focusing on answering the most urgent questions for the field.

We explore whether differential access to family-planning services and the quality of those services explain variability in uptake of contraception among young women in Malawi. We accomplish this by linking the Malawi Schooling and Adolescent Study, a longitudinal survey of young people, with the Malawi Service Provision Assessment collected in 2013–14. We also identify factors that determine choice of facility among those who use contraception. We find that the presence and characteristics of nearby facilities with contraception available did not appear to affect use. Rather, characteristics such as facility type and whether contraception was provided free of charge determined where women deciding to use contraception obtained their contraception. We argue that in a context where almost all respondents resided within 10 kilometers of a health facility, improving access to and quality of family-planning services may not markedly increase contraceptive use among young women without broader shifts in norms regarding childbearing in the early years of marriage.

AbstractThe Adolescent Data Hub (ADH) is the first and largest data catalog specifically developed to focus on open access data on adolescents in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). Developed by the Population Council's Girl Innovation, Research, and Learning (GIRL) Center, and launched in August 2018, the ADH has grown to include more than 750 data sources that fit the inclusion criteria of (1) self‐reported data from females and/or males between ages 10 and 24 years; (2) one or more rounds of data collected in year 2000 or later; (3) data collected in one or more LMICs; (4) data are publicly available for download and use. A dynamic resource, the ADH is regularly updated to include new datasets that meet these criteria. The ADH facilitates access to available data on adolescents for researchers attempting to answer important questions related to the lives of adolescents and for donors and policymakers eager to identify gaps in existing data to inform their future investments.