Category

Research

March 12, 2025

Towards Inclusive Systems: Understanding Adolescent Girls’ Engagement, Challenges, and Demands for System-led Accountability ​

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 Adolescent girls must be at the heart of policies and decisions that shape their lives. To drive meaningful change, they need the skills, resources, and platforms to amplify their voices, hold governments accountable, and influence decision-making processes.

This research, in partnership with ICRW Asia, presents an Accountability Framework co-developed with adolescent girls from India, Nepal, Cambodia, Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Mexico. It explores:
✔️ The mechanisms girls are using to hold systems accountable to their commitments.
✔️ The challenges and opportunities they face in engaging with decision-makers.
✔️ A model accountability platform designed by adolescent girls, adaptable across different countries.
✔️ Key recommendations to strengthen system accountability to adolescent girls’ needs.

This report is a valuable resource for policymakers, practitioners, and organizations seeking to centre adolescent girls in governance and decision-making. It highlights the power of adolescent-led accountability and provides a roadmap for ensuring their voices shape policies that affect them.

Download the report in English, Spanish and French.

March 12, 2025

Investing in Adolescent Girls: Mapping the Donor Landscape (2022 Update)

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The 2022 update of the “Investing in Adolescent Girls” report provides a comprehensive review of global bilateral donor funding dedicated to adolescent girls. The analysis reveals both progress and persistent challenges in achieving equitable and sustainable investments for this demographic. 

This research, part of the AGIP-GAGE series Investing in Adolescent Girls, maps the latest donor Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows, examining funding gaps, trends, and donor priorities while identifying actionable recommendations to ensure robust investments in adolescent girls’ well-being and development. 

Download the full research report here or the webinar report here.

Learn more about AGIP Research here.

November 12, 2024

Resourcing girls: The potential and challenges of girl- and youth-led organising

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Young people have been hailed as torchbearers of gender equality and as key actors in identifying and implementing solutions our world urgently requires. This said, understanding how girl- and youth-led organisations operate and their positioning within the ecosystem of gender equality and social change efforts requires careful examination. This report explores the experiences of girl-and youth-led work across low-and middle-income country contexts, and aims to understand the characteristics, contributions, and challenges of girl-and youth-led organisations. It highlights the global focus on gender equality and girls’ rights, emphasizing the increasing visibility of these issues in development commitments yet the complexities in translating these into tangible benefits for girls.

It draws on a rapid evidence review of secondary literature and key informant interviews with girl-and youth-led organisation members, intermediary organisations involved in funding girl- and youth-led groups and monitoring and evaluation experts to understand the contributions and impact of girl-and youth-led initiatives within the broader ecosystem of adolescent and youth empowerment and development as well to investigate the challenges they face in carrying out and expanding their work. The report concludes with reflections and key recommendations stemming from the research.

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September 19, 2023

Investing in adolescent girls: Key changes in the bilateral donor funding landscape – 2021 updateInvesting in adolescent girls

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Investing in adolescent girls can bring significant returns. There are currently 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 years globally, and most of them (90%) live in low-and middle-income (LMIC) countries. In order to understand the unique challenges faced by adolescent girls in particular, and effectively deliver on the Agenda 2030’s promise to leave no one behind, robust and disaggregated data collection efforts that capture inequalities faced by adolescents are paramount to drive smart investment.

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July 19, 2023

Investing in Adolescent Girls: Key Changes in the bilateral donor funding landscape – 2021 Update

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Amplifying girls’ voices and visibility has been highlighted as a key approach both to ensure programming aims to meet their needs, and to increase young people’s voice, agency and participation in decisions that affect their lives – both as individuals and collectively. There have been growing calls to increase funding to movements and organisations led by girls and youth (Arutynova et al., 2022; Salley, 2019; Mama Cash and FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund, 2018). To date, however, there is limited evidence on how much funding is currently invested in adolescent-and youth-led organisations.

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July 19, 2023

From Advocacy To Action

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A significant proportion of the global population is comprised of adolescents and young people, with an estimated 1.2 billion individuals aged between 10 and 24 years old – the largest ever cohort in history. Adolescence defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the phase of life between the ages of 10 to 19 years – is recognized as a unique and critical life stage marked by the transition from childhood to adulthood.

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April 17, 2023

Young Leaders’ Experiences and Recommendations to Strategically Tackle Child, Early, and Forced Marriage

Research

Tackling the drivers and outcomes of child marriage requires the voices of young activists and researchers as we are able to bring a fresh perspective to understanding the pressures that adolescent girls face in our communities and contribute ideas about solutions that will resonate in our specific contexts. In this commentary, we bring together the voices and experiences of three young women activists and researchers from three additional regions—Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

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April 17, 2023

Adolescent Girls and COVID-19:Mapping the evidence on interventions

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With the COVID-19 crisis continuing to evolve, evidence on the effectiveness of short-term emergency-oriented responses and long-term mitigation strategies is expanding but still limited. There are, and will continue to be, substantial evidence gaps on programming to address risk across outcomes of importance to adolescent girls.

More evidence is needed to slow the risks posed by the pandemic for this sub-population, which can help guide gender- and age-responsive prevention and impact mitigation investments. Evidence from approaches delivered in other unstable contexts may offer important lessons for decision-making in the current context. Recognizing this, Population Council conducted a structured review (under the auspices of the AGIP) of existing evidence collected prior to the pandemic, across low- and middle-income country contexts.