Adolescent Girls Initiative-Kenya: Midline Results ReportMany adolescent girls in Kenya face considerable risks and vulnerabilities that affect their education status, health, and general well-being. In addition to low educational attainment and health risks – including early marriage, teenage pregnancy, early and unprotected sexual activity, nonconsensual sex, and HIV/STIs – other factors that impact education and health outcomes include household poverty, lack of economic independence, limited income-earning opportunities, illiteracy, violence, and social isolation. Younger adolescent girls who live in environments laden with these vulnerabilities are at risk of experiencing negative outcomes such as school dropout, early sexual initiation, unintended pregnancy, early marriage, and sexual and gender-based violence. Therefore, it is critical to intervene before the myriad of challenges that girls face result in outcomes that are irreversible or become too costly to compensate.

The Adolescent Girls Initiative–Kenya (AGI-K) delivered multi-sectoral interventions to over 6,000 girls ages 11–15 in two marginalized areas of Kenya: 1) the Kibera informal settlement in Nairobi and 2) Wajir County in Northeastern Kenya. Implemented by Plan International in Kibera and Save the Children in Wajir, these interventions were carried out for two years and comprised a combination of girl-level, household-level, and community-level interventions. The hypothesis is that these interventions would build girl-level social, education, health, and economic assets, as well as improve household economic assets in the medium term, which will lead to delayed childbearing in the longer term.

This report briefly describes both the intervention and research design of AGI-K, and presents the impact findings from the midline data collection from Wajir County and Kibera. The overall objective of the RCT is to describe and compare the impact of the different program packages at the end of the program. Endline data will be collected in 2019 and will reflect the impact of the program packages two years post-intervention.

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