 I was asked to talk about economic empowerment and I think it's gonna be different than the last presentation, last two presentations a bit because I think I'm gonna talk about sort of programs for adolescent girls in the context of recovery in the case of Liberia from conflict but I think what's emerging and I'll come to this at the very end is thinking about how these programs can help women deal with with the effects of conflict as they experience it or or other crises and I'll come back to that. Alright so just a bit of motivation for focusing on adolescent girls in Sub-Saharan Africa for those of you who don't know this there's there's a lot of youth in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is the population pyramid of Uganda compared to more developed countries. Uganda really looks like a pyramid, the rest of the world doesn't anymore. When we look at girl young women relative to young men they're less likely to be working. You hear a lot of policy makers talking about unemployed young men but but girls are less likely to be working. The third fact is in here's Uganda again they're they're more likely to be having children younger so the bottom two parts of this graph are the young people and you can see relative to elsewhere in Uganda the fertility rate is is is quite high. So you take all these facts and then you put it together with with a number of particularly Sub-Saharan Africa specific issues in terms that are present in adolescents. HIV risk, sexually transmitted infections. Then there's this global issue which is true in the US as well as in Uganda that early motherhood is going to change the economic trajectory of a woman and then you compound it with gender specific issues on labor market entry. So there's some evidence that that women entering the labor market are going to have smaller networks and access to information about jobs and that high fertility is is going to be compounded by a domestic work burden that's going to limit their options. Okay so range of things that make us think that we want to think about a program that's that's targeted at some of these issues and needs to take into account these constraints but then that maybe suggests that we shouldn't just do you know just normal vocational training and think of of a more multifaceted program that tackles other issues at the same time. And I'm going to compare two programs today one of which focuses more on these complimentary interventions than the other. But before I get to those two programs just a quick review of what we know from the literature then the summary of the slide is not much. So I'll spare you all the different things. I think one thing that's interesting coming out of the work in Latin America where there's more evidence in terms of rigorous evidence is that some kinds of programs particularly when they make special allowances in terms of mobility and daycare seem to work better for women than for men. That's the conclusion you could probably draw from some of the Latin American evidence. But there's still very large questions about how these programs work outside of Latin America and different kinds of programs in different contexts. So pretty not a huge amount of evidence for policymaking in this area. Alright so today I'm going to talk about two programs. The first is an EPAG program. Don't ask me what the acronyms mean. There's some adolescence empowerment. This is a $4 million program that was funded through the World Bank's Adolescent Girls Initiative. It targets girls 16 to 27 and there are two tracks. One is a job or business skills, sorry, one is a wage work track. So to get to a wage job and the second is the business start your own business track. One key feature of this program is that the providers who were not the government, they were NGOs and private entities, they were highly incentivized on job retention. So they were paid a lot of their payment if the girls had jobs after six months. There was a life skills component. I think the second program I'm going to show you has more on that side and you'll see differential impacts for that. The second program is the ELA program run by the NGO Brack in Uganda. It targets girls 14 to 20 of three main components that I'm going to talk about today. One is a safe space. So there's a club house in the village or in the community where the girls can hang out. No boys allowed. The second is a set of life skills training which really run the gamut from household negotiation to reproductive health. And a lot of time was spent on that. The third is a livelihood training, much lighter than the Liberia program. Liberia program is much more in the vein of traditional labor market training. But in Uganda, these were very localized. So the girls were trained based on local market conditions and they were also not every girl in the same club was trained on the same thing. So you didn't have 10 new vegetable sellers in your village. So what we did is we're coming into this adolescent girls advocacy space, which is filled with a lot of advocacy. But as I said, there's not a lot of evidence. So what we're trying to bring to the space is some more evidence. So we did randomized control trials with working with these with these programs. In both cases, in Uganda, this was at the village level. Liberia was cohorts over time. And we collected a whole range of data from these girls. In Uganda, we did actually now we've done three interviews two years apart. We're about to do maybe a fourth. And I can talk about that. There's some interesting mobility impacts of the program that we're still trying to understand. And Liberia was two interviews one year apart. And looking at not just employment, but you'll see SGBV outcomes, you'll see you'll see expenditure health outcomes as well. All right. So the results skip the longer description of what we did. In Liberia, there's a there's a marked increase in employment went up 47% for these girls earnings went or these young women earnings went up by by $32 per month, which is about 80% of what they were making at baseline. The effects are much stronger in Liberia for the business skills. Stream of trainees rather than the job skills trainees. They also were saving more of their money, which went went up by a lot for them. In Uganda, we see we also see a big a big increase relative to the baseline, right? It's a smaller overall effect, but relative effect is bigger. In Uganda, this is again, mostly driven by the businesses starting your own business. What's interesting in Uganda is we asked about money they spent on themselves. So items that they themselves consume airtime, hairdressing, jewelry. And that went up by 38%. So more financial independence for these girls. Most of them, as compared to Liberia, most of the girls in Uganda were still in school, and they stayed in school, there's no effects on on education here. In Uganda, going beyond just the economic outcomes, girls are 26% less likely relative to the compare girls in the comparison villages to have a child. They're much more likely to say they always use a condom. And given that they're not changing any other contraception use, and the number of children they have as much lower, we kind of we think they are actually much more likely to always be using a condom. And the incidence of sex against their will drops by 41%. So here, here's a very complicated graph. But basically what it's capturing is the girls views of gender roles in the household. And everything that's circled in red, so higher levels of education, earning money, fetching water, feeding and bathing children are areas where the girls who were in the clubs were much more likely to say that this is jointly the risk equally the responsibility of a man and a woman. Okay, so there's a significant movement out in certain dimensions, looking after ill people washing, cleaning and cooking, and helping children with studies don't change. All right, but for, but in a number of these dimensions, these girls are more likely to say that these are, these are equal responsibilities. One other element that we've captured is looking at the reaction of their brothers. And their brothers are also changing their behavior in response to living in households with with more empowered girls. That's, that's a longer discussion. So I'm going to pass for now. In turn, in Liberia, we don't see much in the in the reproductive health realm. There's no change in actual or desired fertility, no impact on contraceptions, boyfriends or SGBV. We do see increases in self confidence and their satisfaction with job outcomes, though. So there's, there's movement on the psychologist psychological side. So question is what, you know, what are you how much against these returns? How much is the program costing? So in Liberia, Liberia is a significantly more expensive program. It costs about $1,600 for the job skills track per beneficiary 1200 for the business skills track, compared to other labor, you know, labor market programs, the Hovenas programs in Latin America, this is, this is about average. And then you can see that in terms of just their earnings, after two years in the business, after two years in having your own business, you recover the costs of the business goes track, given the lower benefits for job skills, it takes longer. And Uganda's, as I said, is a cheaper program and costs about $18 per year for to run this program, which is compared to the their annual expenditures on themselves is about 21%. So you can set this cost of $18 against the increased employment, the lower fertility, and also that very large drop in in sex against their will. So so those that's a summary of the results on the two programs. I'm happy to take questions about those when we when we open up later. We have two other pieces of analysis ongoing, which I think will help answer that question I posed at the beginning on translation to other contexts, and also the effect of different types of crisis on girls who've been through this program or girls who are in this program. So one is is in South Sudan. And it was interesting to hear all those presentation because we're seeing some similar patterns in South Sudan. And and here the results are really going to let us understand. So what happened was the program was had been discontinued before the 2013 conflict. So we'll be able to understand how girls who had been this through this program, whether the conflict or not. The early results suggest they had very different experiences than girls who who weren't in conflict. And they had different experiences than the effects that Ogil was talking about of conflict itself. In Sierra Leone, we have a slightly different situation where the program was actually interrupted for a while because of the Ebola crisis. So here, we're going to be able to answer questions about how the girls who went through varying degrees of exposure to the Ebola epidemic at the household and community level, how they came out the other side with and without the program. So that's it for me. Just to note that this is work based on a whole group of people, some of whom work in the Gender Innovation Lab. And you can find more on our website.