Giving Adolescent Girls the Chance to Reach Their Full Potential
The more than 500 million adolescent girls who live in the developing world represent a huge untapped potential: They hold the key to breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty and achieving the MDGs. Whether adolescent girls flourish with opportunities or languish in poverty can decisively influence the direction of their countries’ long-term development prospects. More fundamentally, these girls have the right to realize their full potential.
No longer children, but not quite adults, young people are often forgotten when it comes to public programmes, investments and policymaking. Adolescent girls face even greater risks of being left out. Discrimination is pervasive. As they enter puberty, bias against girls puts them at higher risk than boys for dropping out of school and being subjected to sexual violence or child marriage. Too often, adolescent girls have limited friendship networks and few safe or supportive spaces. In most cases, they lack mentors or adult support for providing acuurate information. Programmes and services to reach adolescent girls need to create safe and secure spaces for them, and make sure adult support is available.
While boys' freedoms and opportunities may expand when they reach puberty, girls often face restricted mobility and choices. In some societies, adolescent girls are forbidden to socialize with boys and are restricted from playing or moving about outside the home.
Young married women and girls have often been left off the global adolescent reproductive health agenda because of the incorrect assumption that their married status ensures them a safe passage to adulthood.
Because of these factors, programmes designed for adolescents and youth often end up attracting a disproportionate number of young men.
Adolescent girls who are part of marginalized groups are triply disenfranchised – by their youth, their gender and their status. Those who are impoverished, trafficked, affected by humanitarian crises, disabled, out-of-school because of marriage or other reasons, migrants or members of indigenous groups face numerous infringements on their basic human rights. Reaching out to them is essential both in terms of social justice and achieving the MDGs.
In any developing country, marginalized adolescent girls bear a disproportionate burden of discrimination and human rights violations as reflected in increased poverty, high school drop outs, forced sexual exploitation, HIV infection, unintended pregnancy, maternal mortality and morbidities, unsafe abortion, child labour and trafficking. Young women are especially vulnerable to HIV. In addition to greater vulnerability for physiological reasons, they have less power to negotiate safe sex. Yet youth programmes, which are mushrooming in many countries, rarely reach marginalized adolescent girls, in particular very young adolescent girls.
Investing in the health, education and rights of women, and by extension in girls, is a particularly strategic way to address poverty and speed progress toward achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. Investments that enable girls to reach their full potential offer a double dividend in terms of achieving the MDGs because of the dual productive and reproductive roles that women play. Comprehensive educational and life-skills programmes that reachmarginalized girls before they become mothers will reduce maternal and infant mortality and help end cycles of intergenerational poverty.
Addressing the needs of adolescent girls should be part of a continuum of care and support – a way to build on social investments made during childhood and to ensure that young women have a strong foundation, in terms of health, education and life skills, for the pivotal roles they will be assuming in their families and communities as adults.
Ideally, interventions should address many dimensions of a girl’s life. That’s why UNFPA promotes a multisectoral approach that considers reproductive and sexual health care as just one aspect of personal development to be offered within a context of other health and social services and opportunities for skills development. In some countries, for instance, girls clubs offer recreation as well as counselling or guidance related to family problems, jobs, relationships, and reproductive health. In many cases, a reproductive health component can be added to ongoing activities such as vocational training, micro-credit projects and sports programmes.
UNFPA and its partners recognize that simply increasing conventional youth programming will not reach the large population of marginalized, disadvantaged girls who are in greatest need of services and support. Through joint programming and active partnerships, such as the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, they are attempting to take a more integrated and comprehensive approach that considers the social and economic environment in which young people live, their education, their health, and the opportunities that can help them improve their own lives.
Two projects in Ethiopia, for example, take a broad approach to improving the overall well-being and prospects of young girls. The Berhane Hewan project aims to impart knowledge, skills and resources rural girls need to avoid early marriage, and provides support to girls who are already married. Developed through extensive consultation with the community, it integrates a number of innovative incentives to girls and their families, including awarding graduates of the 18-month programme with a pregnant ewe, along with a certificate.
Biruh Tesfa, or Bright Future, is a programme for poor urban girls at risk of exploitation and abuse in Addis Ababa, developed by the Ethiopian Ministry of Youth and Sport and the Addis Ababa Youth and Sport Commission, with technical assistance from the Population Council and support from DFID, the United Nations Foundation and UNFPA. Implemented in a slum area of Addis Ababa, the project targets out-of school girls aged 10 to 19, most of whom are migrants, living away from parents and family members, and unlikely to be reached by other programmes. Biruh Tesfa provides girls a safe space to build support networks with other girls and women and promotes functional literacy, life and livelihood skills, and reproductive health education.
In Guatemala, a UNFPA-supported project addresses the needs of socially isolated Mayan girls who face heavy workloads; limited mobility, autonomy or support for staying in school; vulnerability to violence; and child marriage and pregnancy. Girls clubs were formed to provide a safe place to meet peers and adult mentors, who encouraged them to stay in school and offered support on sensitive subjects. This is one of the projects featured in an hour-long PBS documentary, Child Brides, Stolen Lives, which looks at child marriage around the world.
A new training tool, developed by the YWCA with UNFPA support, aims to make young
women catalysts for positive change in their lives and communities. Created by and for young women, the manual is designed to put young women in control of educating and empowering themselves to take action on key issues that affect their lives.
UNFPA is also active in the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), which aims to close the gender gap in primary and secondary education and to ensure that by 2015, all children complete primary schooling, with girls and boys having equal access to all levels of education.
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