About the Report

Download Report

The report features findings from an evaluation of EMPOWER that used quantitative pre-post and descriptive analyses to measure changes in the outcomes for adolescent girls and women and qualitative analysis to contextualize findings. The evaluation’s primary objectives were to determine whether EMPOWER increased participants’ skill levels and, in turn, increased adolescent girls’ access to acceptable work and adolescent girls’ and women’s involvement in self-employment and paid work. The evaluation also measured changes to other outcomes sought by EMPOWER such as increased awareness of child labor and increased access to business and financial networks. Pre-post analyses relied on pre-project data collected as part of the evaluation’s monitoring and evaluation plan (baseline, January-March 2019) and post-project data commissioned by Mathematica one year after participants completed project activities (endline, March-July 2021) collected either shortly after the adolescent girls and women completed project activities (interim, April to September 2020) and/or one year after they completed project activities (endline, March-July 2021) or similar.

Research Questions

• To what extent did adolescent girls and women selected for EMPOWER participate in the program?
• What was the change in adolescent girls’ and women’s skills targeted by EMPOWER, such as life skills, functional literacy, entrepreneurship skills, and agriculture-focused technical/vocational skills, before and after enrolling?
• What was the change in women’s knowledge and awareness of child labor, child rights, and gender equality before and after enrolling in EMPOWER?
• What was the change in adolescent girls’ and women’s participation in business-oriented networks before and after enrolling in EMPOWER?
• What was the change in adolescent girls’ participation in acceptable work before and after enrolling in EMPOWER?
• What was the change in adolescent girls’ and women’s participation in paid employment and self-employment before and after enrolling in EMPOWER?

Key Takeaways

• Participation was a substantial challenge for EMPOWER. Approximately 60 percent of adolescent girls and 71 percent of women completed the life skills module and only 44 percent of adolescent girls and 56 percent of women completed the technical/vocational skills module. With this level of exposure, it is possible many participants were not able to build the full set of skills fostered by EMPOWER. Also, the project’s high time requirements were reported to be a major challenge to participation.
• We found little or mixed evidence of changes to adolescent girls’ and women’s skill levels, though literacy and numeracy were an important exception. The project improved basic number recognition skills but not higher- level arithmetic skills. Specifically, the share of adolescent girls who could read a full sentence increased by 12 percentage points and the share that recognize four-digit numbers (the highest level of number recognition) rose by 13 percentage points.
• According to EMPOWER’s results framework, increased skills were a precondition for participants to improve work and employment outcomes. Researchers were unable to measure changes in these outcomes due to missing data and other measurement challenges.
• A small share of participants, mostly women, reported having participated in business and financial networks at endline. At endline, 9 percent of adolescent girls and 17 percent of women reported they had participated in a business network in the last three months; and 16 percent of adolescent girls and 37 percent of women reported they had participated in a financial network. (We assume that adolescent girls and women had no participation at baseline, so these numbers indicate change from zero).
• Acceptable work is only conceptually relevant for working age youth (ages 13+ in Zambia), yet most adolescent girls reached adulthood over the course of the project. Increasing access to acceptable work may have not been an appropriate outcome for EMPOWER as improvements in this outcome would have been short lived.

Citation

Aponte, A., Fantozzi, E., Beatty, A., Tembo, G., Matome, C., Tembo, N., Borkum, E. (2022). Mathematica. Final Evaluation of Increasing Economic and Social Empowerment for Adolescent Girls and Vulnerable Women (EMPOWER) in Zambia. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

Download Report   View Study Profile

The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.