This case study focuses on BRAC’s experience and learning over the past 15 years delivering financial services to primarily adolescent girls in Bangladesh. Through its Employment and Livelihood for Adolescents program (ELA), BRAC offers savings and credit facilities, livelihood training and issue discussion services to youth aged between 14-25 years. The case outlines the evolution of ELA into the ‘Social and Financial Empowerment of Adolescents’ (SOFEA) program (which continues to be known as ELA in Africa), the challenges of providing financial services to youth, and the lessons BRAC has learnt and embraced over time.
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| Case Study on BRAC and Youth.pdf | 3.41 MB |
Creating awareness of the importance of education and the difference between acceptable work for children and exploitative child labour can help break the cycle of child labour and poverty. This manual aims to provide best practice advice derived from evaluations of 100 projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as part of Winrock international's Community-based Innovations to Reduce Child Labour through Education (CIRCLE) project.
Split into two sections, the manual attempts to provide a holistic overview of child labour, lessons learnt and best practices. Section one provides background information on the interrelated issues of child labour and education including the causes and consequences of child labour, and the existing legislative framework. It also takes a look at project design guidelines aimed at combating child labour through education interventions.
Section two outlines the practical learning from a range of projects under the CIRCLE umbrella including the principal design elements and components critical to ensuring the effective and sustainable outcomes. Pre-empting or overcoming challenges have been organised under the following topics:
- Awareness raising
- Advocacy
- Education
- Vocational education and skills training
- Peer education
- Child labour monitoring
- Data collection
A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have strong, positive effects on a range of welfare indicators for poor households in developing countries. However, the contribution of individual program components toward achieving these outcomes is not well understood. This paper contributes to filling this gap by explicitly testing the importance of conditionality on one specific outcome related to human capital formation (namely school enrollment), using data collected during the evaluation of Mexico's Programa de Educación, Salud, y Alimentación (PROGRESA) CCT program. We exploit the fact that some PROGRESA beneficiaries who received transfers did not receive the forms needed to monitor their children's attendance at school. We use a variety of techniques, including nearest neighbor matching and household fixed effects regressions, to show that the lack of these forms reduced the likelihood of children attending school, with this effect being most pronounced among children who were transitioning to lower secondary school. We provide substantial evidence that these findings are not driven by unobservable characteristics related to households or localities.
Martin Burt returned to Paraguay in 1985 and started an innovative microcredit program.
Fundación Paraguaya has supported 30,000 microentrepreneurs who have created 19,000 new jobs. Its Junior Achievement program has helped build the entrepreneurial skills of more than 50,000 young people.
Two years ago, the organization took over a bankrupt agricultural school and turned it into a model enterprise that helps young people learn to think of themselves not as "poor campesinos" but as "rural entrepreneurs."
Learn about his story in this episode of Uncommon Heroes, funded by the Skoll Foundation. More information at www.skollfoundation.org.
This report outlines PEPFAR's approach to meeting the challenges of OVCs and provides an overview of guiding principles and core programming areas.
This publication analyses national legislation on the duration of compulsory education and legal safeguards against adult responsibilities infringing on children's education. What it shows is that children's right to education is currently under threat from early marriage, child labour and imprisonment; States have not adapted their legislation in favour of the right to education, and they do not have agreed standards for the transition from childhood to adulthood either internationally or nationally.
The Social and Financial Empowerment of Adolescents (SOFEA) project is a BRAC initiative aimed at providing adolescent girls with financial and social support to enable them to empower themselves.
There are 600 million teenage girls living in poverty in the developing world. The majority of these girls live under conditions characterized by prevalent inequalities due to subordination, early marriage, frequent pregnancy, abandonment, divorce, abduction, war, domestic violence, marginalization and exclusion from both financial and social systems. SOFEA evolved out of the need to serve these girls, aged 14-25 years. This group has remained vulnerable and highly underrated in terms of its potential to bring about immense positive change. These girls can change not only their lives but also that of the communities in which they live through their impact on future generations: their children.
The SOFEA program comprises of the following vital components:
- A secure place for adolescent girls to socialize
- Life-skills training
- Livelihood training
- Financial literacy
- Savings and credit facilities
- Community sensitization
The components complement each other and create the complete support structure needed by an adolescent girl. The secure place provides a much-needed socialization space creating social cohesion. Life skills training raises girls’ level of social awareness, allowing them to make informed decisions. Livelihood training equips girls with the skills they need to engage in income generating activities, starting them off on the path towards financial independence. The financial literacy course provides insight into the financial aspects of managing a small business. The credit and savings facilities are a source for seed capital for the girls to start small businesses. To garner support from their families and the community, the program engages in community sensitization to ensure that even after BRAC leaves, these girls will continue enjoying their rights, as well as receive the attention and support that they deserve from their family and community.
The project aims at empowering girls to make more informed decisions about issues that affect their lives. Over time, these girls become more confident and independent through social and financial empowerment. By educating them, the girls will lead a healthy life and be informed mothers bringing up healthy families in the future.
The project is also active in Tanzania and Uganda, where it is known as Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA)
Farzana Kashfi
Head of SOFEA Program
BRAC Centre
75 Mohakhali
Dhaka 1212
Bangladesh
farzana.kashfi@gmail.com
Location
Children who grow up in poverty are at risk of growing up poor and passing poverty on to their own children. Action to improve the quality and accessibility of education, healthcare and social protection programmes and to prevent nutritional problems would drastically reduce these poverty cycles. To be truly effective and sustainable, investment in these areas must be part of integrated strategies that boost poor families' livelihoods and prioritise children as an important cohort of the population rather than a marginal group. They must also go hand in hand with concerted action to promote accountability, reduce inequality and address discrimination and aid which supports, rather than undermines, these changes.
This article argues with a literature review that a simplistic distinction between strong and weak evidence hinged on the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the federal "gold standard" for generating rigorous evidence on social programs and policies, is not tenable with evaluative studies of complex, field interventions such as those found in education. It introduces instead the concept of grades of evidence, illustrating how the choice of research designs coupled with the rigor with which they can be executed under field conditions, affects evidence quality progressively. It argues that evidence from effectiveness research should be graded on different design dimensions, accounting for conceptualization and execution aspects of a study. Well-implemented, phased designs using multiple research methods carry the highest potential to yield the best grade of evidence on effects of complex, field interventions.
Unemployment rates among youth in Sierra Leone are around 60 to 70 percent. In order to address this challenge, the IRC is working with the Ministry of Education Youth and Sports (MEYS) to revise the Junior Secondary School (JSS) curriculum so that JSS teachers will be equipped to deliver entrepreneurship and life skills training as embedded components of all subject syllabi. Entrepreneurship skills include financial management and project management, while life skills include problem-solving, decision-making, critical thinking, communication and conflict-resolution. Given the complex nature of challenges faced by youth in Sierra Leone, this combination of life and entrepreneurship skills helps young people navigate obstacles and shocks to livelihoods produced by social, political and economic changes.
Carrie Berg
Youth and Livelihoods Program Manager
Carrie.berg@theirc.org
The LEGACY Project in Liberia, an initiative of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), works to increase opportunities for formal schooling, skills training, and improved protection for children and youth. The project in Liberia supports the development of a vocational/skills training program driven by labor demand; enhances the quality of training in market-driven skills; creates linkages with the private sector and local businesses; enhances job-seeking abilities; targets marginalized at-risk youth, emphasizing gender equality; influences the design and monitoring of projects to ensure programs will give Liberian youth the requisite skills that will allow them to find work and earn a living wage; and builds networks of all the relevant stakeholders to increase their ability to influence policy and practice.
The main objective of LEGACY project activities in Liberia is to increase access of girls and traditionally excluded youth to quality and relevant technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in Lofa and Nimba counties. This objective will be achieved by:
- Establishing a National Working Group (NWG) to set standards and advocate for increased quality and relevance of and access to TVET by girls and traditionally excluded youth;
- Increasing quality and relevance of TVET in targeted TVET institutions in Lofa and Nimba counties;
- Increasing access of targeted vocational training centers (VTCs) by girls and traditionally excluded youth; and
- Increasing the income levels of targeted VTCs and providing support for more girls to access vocational training on an ongoing basis.
These initiatives will promote increased accountability of the Government and NGO vocational training practitioners to provide marginalized older youth with safe opportunities to learn and apply marketable skills, working to ensure the relevance and impact of vocational training.
LEGACY Initiative
SEEP PLP for Youth and Workforce Development
Abu Macpherson
abu.macpherson@liberia.theirc.org
Carrie Berg
Youth and Livelihoods Program Manager
Carrie.berg@theirc.org
In every region of the world, youth face difficulty entering the labor market, however particular challenges face youth in the Middle East and North Africa, which has the highest concentration of unemployed young people. Save the Children has been working on different models that look at youth employment/livelihoods/entrepreneurship since 2006, work which has informed the Rural Youth Livelihood Program (RYL), a pilot program launched in 2008 as part of an integrated program targeting adolescents who are both in and out of school in Egypt.
The goal of the Rural Youth Livelihoods Program (RYL) is to equip adolescents in rural Egypt to successfully navigate the transition to work by:
- imparting effective strategies to generate and maintain means of living,
- enhancing youth well-being and ability to plan for their futures, and
- improve youths’ ability to withstand crises and shocks.
In order to achieve this goal the project has the following employment and enterprise development objectives for 2008:
- Build the assets and competencies of 400 young people to make informed choices about market relevant work opportunities.
- Enable 400 young people to map and manage resources available to them including market information and income from subsistence activities.
- Support 400 young people realize the potential of using financial services for themselves or others in their households to invest in skills building or grow a business
SEEP PLP for Youth and Workforce Development
Tamer Kirolos
Deputy Country Director for Programs
tkirolos@savechildren.org
