Overall, the research aims to determine:
a) Which combination(s) of interventions produce(s) the greatest change in the wellbeing of adolescent girls?
b) What is the most cost-effective way to achieve the greatest impact for adolescent girls?
It does this through a randomised control trial, which measures changes in adolescent girl well-being achieved through four different intervention packages:
- Violence Prevention
- Violence Prevention + Education
- Violence Prevention + Education + Health
- Violence Prevention + Education + Health + Wealth Creation
The programme delivers the intervention packages to 6,000 girls aged 11-14 in two marginalised areas of Kenya (3,000 girls in each): 1) Kibera slum in Nairobi and 2) Wajir County in Northeastern Kenya.
Itad leads the cost-effectiveness component of AGI-K. It does this by comparing the unit costs and incremental costs of each intervention package with the results achieved by each. At the midline, the cost-effectiveness analysis found that when the objective is to maximise girls’ welfare on a range of indicators, it is more cost-effective to adopt a multi-sectoral approach, combining a package of interventions. For example, the research found that combining health and wealth safe spaces not only led to a larger effect size on the health and wealth creation outcomes but also larger effects on education for the subset of girls who actively participated. In Wajir, the effects on school enrolment were double for girls who actively participated in the VEH and VEHW arms.
