Shaping Futures: Planning ahead for Girls' Empowerment and Employability

"Together, the skills the girls learned as well as the support of their schools enabled a positive impact on their self-efficacy, gender positive attitudes and desire to plan for the future (employability)."

The Planning Ahead for Girls' Empowerment and Employability (PAGE) programme, funded by MacArthur Foundation, was designed to build empowerment and employability skills among adolescent girls (ages 15-17) from low-income communities in 4 government schools in New Delhi, India. The project's two main goals were to build girls' self-efficacy and build their ability to identify, and to plan and realise, their future personal and professional goals. In late 2016, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and the Magic Bus India Foundation conducted an evaluation of the program to better understand the programme's effect on girls. This report outlines the goals of, challenges around, and results from this evaluation of PAGE.

School completion data in India shows that attrition is high for low-income girls and boys as they transition from middle to secondary school; however, it is much higher for girls than boys. The factors that trigger attrition among girls include early marriage, parents' fear for their safety, and a perception among girls and their parents that secondary education is a poor investment due to a lack of concrete employment possibilities. Globally, there is a disconnect between schooling (partial or complete) and pathways to productive work: 34% of young women in developing countries are out of the labour force and not in school. ICRW hypothesised that providing girls with the life skills needed to prepare them for formal employment and fostering their ambitions for a career can help keep them in school and catalyze their path toward formal jobs. They hypothesised that the key mediator linking the programme activities to girls' improved self-confidence was a supportive and enabling school and peer environment.

The programme sessions began in schools during October 2014, with 4,100 girls enrolled in four schools across East and South Delhi (all girls who were in the grade 9 and 11 of the intervention schools participated in the programme). The Magic Bus team comprised 14 Youth Mentors (YMs) and two Training and Monitoring Officers (TMOs). The programme implementation had three main components: curriculum implementation in schools with adolescent girls; community engagement with parents; and engagement with teachers.

Specifically, first, the girls participated in a curriculum that focused on two components: Empowerment and Employability. The Empowerment component focused on building girls' understanding of gender and power and developed their self-efficacy skills. Under the Employability component, the girls were given concrete pathways to envision career possibilities. The Employability component included skill-building as well as interaction with employment partners through school-based career events, during which information was provided to advance the girls' understanding of and interest in various career possibilities. (See page 9 of the report for the conceptual framework). The programme concluded its last session in schools in the third week of December 2015.

Second, for engaging parents with the programme, organisers conducted bi-monthly community outreach sessions during the summer of 2015 with mothers, fathers, and other community members related to the girls who participated in the programme. These sessions acted as a platform for parents to learn about the programme, ask questions, and give feedback. Across all four implementation schools, the team of YMs conducted 36 parent engagement sessions (reaching out to around 300 parents) across four communities. Finally, the implementation team engaged with the schoolteachers, partnering with STiR Education in order to create a network of teachers who would be interested in bolstering the programme uptake in schools for the long run. In total, 48 teachers participated in three STIR trainings across four schools. A group of 15 selected teachers from each school was motivated to develop a micro-innovation based on the discussion and their reflections of the change they would want to bring in the students in the classrooms.

ICRW research staff measured the preliminary effectiveness of the PAGE programme using a mixed method, quasi-experimental evaluation design. Seven purposively sampled government schools in New Delhi participated in the study, of which there were four intervention schools and three control schools. Researchers used pre-post quantitative surveys in intervention and control schools to measure the impact of the intervention programme, measuring several key outcomes to understand the impact of the programme on girls' empowerment and the employability outcomes. They also collected qualitative data via in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with purposively selected girls from both the intervention and control schools. The empowerment indicators included measures of girls' self-efficacy (their ability to have a say in critical decisions in their lives, around their marriages for instance - measured by a self-efficacy index), attitudes toward gender norms or gender equitable attitudes (using the Gender Equitable Men Scale or GEMS), and recognition of discrimination in their lives (using a discrimination and violence index. The employability indicators included measures of aspiration for higher studies and for a career, enrollment in learning opportunities outside school, seeking information for future goals, and preparing a resume. An employability index was used.

As explained in the report through narrative and graphs, for all four outcome measures of self-efficacy, attitudes toward gender equality, and discrimination, and employability, the researchers found that there was an improvement in the intervention schools, and the change was positive and significant. (The impact was greater for older girls.) To cite some specific findings: There was a statistically significant increase in the proportion of girls who sought information about their future goals in both intervention and control schools, but the increase was higher in the intervention schools. Using a difference in difference (DiD) approach, the researchers found a statistically significant difference between the two groups for the statements such as "I like to go to school because my peers accept me" or "I like to go to school because my teachers accept me." They also found a positive and significant effect of the intervention itself on interest in schooling (peer and teacher engagement) using a DiD multivariate analysis. There was an improvement in peer interactions for girls in intervention schools as compared to control schools. There was also a positive effect on girls' perception around schools as a learning environment through teacher interaction.

In the discussion section, organisers suggest that PACE "created a space in the classrooms through the medium of an innovative curriculum and participatory facilitation and mentoring. The curriculum and the pedagogy together allowed girls to break the denial of existence of violence and discrimination within and around their lives. Existing attitudes were replaced by more gender equitable ones. Girls exposed to the program had higher self-efficacy, which along with a belief in gender equality, would allow girls to challenge and negotiate their realities toward better outcomes for the future.... Enhanced communications skills are another capability that the program nurtured in the girls. This has been captured in the measure of self-efficacy in the key results of the impact of the program. As the girls embarked on their self-reflective journey, skills around problem-solving and decision-making increased their self-confidence and agency to negotiate with their families and share their aspirations." The researchers go on to say that "[t]he facilitators and the way they were trained on the curriculum had a critical role in the change we observed. The examples and experiences drawn by the YMs from their personal lives helped build a strong rapport with girls. The girls had never had this level of personal engagement and skill building in their lives and through well-thought content and facilitation, they opened up and began sharing their personal stories with us. We used these in the facilitation of the program to make it more impactful and meaningful."

The researchers explain that the programme faced a lot of execution challenges with respect to the school time-tables and permissions, parental support and engagement, and the girls' own lack of personal efficacy to be aspirational for the future. Over the course of the programme, they learned, for example, that the engagement of the community, particularly parents of the younger girls, was important to break the gendered notions around work and workspace. In addition to challenges, the study also had limitations. For instance, the researchers did not follow a cohort of girls from baseline to endline. The high rate of attrition girls experience as they tried and failed to pass exams resulted in many girls discontinuing school during the period of the intervention. Recognising that the very high loss-to-follow-up rates in a cohort would threaten the validity of the study results, they shifted to using serial cross sectional samples of students.

"With the lessons learned in implementation and content, we are poised to execute a stronger program that will be implemented within an ecosystem of engaging with parents, male peers and teachers. A future program called Plan-It Girls, based on the PAGE curriculum and learning, has been developed that hopes to have a more ambitious scope and impact. We are initiating this program in Jharkhand and Delhi in 2017."