Girl Empower - A gender transformative mentoring and cash transfer intervention to promote adolescent wellbeing: Impact findings from a cluster-randomized controlled trial in Liberia

Jul 19, 2026

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Evaluates Girl Empower, an intervention equipping adolescent girls with skills for healthy, strategic life choices and safety from sexual abuse through a cluster-randomized controlled trial with three arms: control, Girl Empower (GE), and GE plus (cash incentives to caregivers). GE used a life skills curriculum for girls aged 13–14 in Liberia with local female mentors. Impact was assessed across seven domains via standardized indices, showing small non-significant effects on sexual violence and schooling at 24 months, but positive effects on gender attitudes, life skills, and sexual and reproductive health.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time28 min

Article

Background

Methods

Findings

Interpretation

Study context and rationale

Public Disclosure Authorized Public Disclosure Authorized SSM-Population Health 10 (2020) 100527 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect SSM - Population Health journal homepage: [http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ssmph](http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ssmph) | Article Girl Empower – A gender transformative mentoring and cash transfer intervention to promote adolescent wellbeing: Impact findings from a cluster-randomized controlled trial in Liberia | | | | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Berk €Ozlera, *, Kelly Hallman b, Marie-France Guimondc, Elizabeth A. Kelvin d, Marian Rogers c, Esther Karnley c a The World Bank, 1818 H Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20433, United States b Population Council, United States c International Rescue Committee, United States d City University of New York, United States | | | | | A R T I C L E I N F O | | A B S T R A C T | | | Keywords: Sexual violence Mentoring programs Cash transfers Adolescent welfare | | Background: We evaluated Girl Empower – an intervention that aimed to equip adolescent girls with the skills to make healthy, strategic life choices and to stay safe from sexual abuse using a cluster-randomized controlled trial with three arms: control, Girl Empower (GE), and GEþ. Methods: GE delivered a life skills curriculum to girls aged 13–14 in Liberia, facilitated by local female mentors. In the GE þ variation, a cash incentive payment was offered to caregivers for girls’ participation in the program. We evaluated the impact of the program on seven pre-specified domains using standardized indices: sexual violence, schooling, sexual and reproductive health (SRH), psychosocial wellbeing, gender attitudes, life skills, and protective factors. Findings: Participation rates in the program were high in both GE and GEþ, with the average participant attending 28 out of 32 sessions. At 24 months, the standardized effects of both GE and GEþ, compared to control, on sexual violence, schooling, psychosocial wellbeing, and protective factors were small (β, 􀀔 0.11 standard deviations [SD]) and not statistically significant at the 95% level of confidence. However, we found positive standardized effects on Gender Attitudes (GE: β, 0.206 SD, p<0.05; GEþ: β, 0.228 SD, p<0.05), Life Skills (GE: β, 0.224 SD, p<0.05; GEþ: β, 0.289 SD, p<0.01), and SRH (GE: β, 0.244 SD, p<0.01; GEþ: β, 0.372 SD, p<0.01; Ftest for GE ¼ GEþ: p ¼ 0.075). Interpretation: Girl Empower led to sustained improvements in several important domains, including SRH, but did not reduce sexual violence among the target population. | | Violence against women (VAW) and children (VAC) are global epidemics that have lifelong impacts on the health and welfare of individuals, families, and communities. The epidemics are closely linked; VAW and VAC tend co-occur within households and exposure to VAC predicts female experience and male perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV) during adulthood (Guedes, Bott, Garcia-Moreno, & Colombini, 2016). Because of their age, however, adolescents may not have access to supportive interventions, most of which are aimed at supporting either married adult females or younger children; adolescent girls may therefore not have access to violence prevention or response services (Ellsberg et al., 2017; Bruce & Hallman, 2008). Liberia, the setting for this study, has a history of armed conflict during which women suffered greatly (Swiss et al., 1998; Dziewanski, 2012); high levels of interpersonal and sexual violence (SV) continue to occur, particularly in areas that saw high conflict events and fatalities during the civil war (Kelly, Colantuoni, Robinson, & Decker, 2018). Programs designed to work specifically with adolescent girls as a unique subpopulation began to appear in the early 1990s in the HIV field and early 2000s more generally (Bruce & Hallman, 2008; Gibbs, Jacobson, & Kerr Wilson, 2017). Some of these (reviewed by (Bruce & Hallman, 2008; Marcus, Gupta-Archer, Da

FAQs

Did Girl Empower reduce sexual violence among the target population?

No. The interpretation reports that Girl Empower did not reduce sexual violence among the target population, despite improvements in other domains.

Jul 19, 2026

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