Evaluation of an Adolescent Development Program for Girls in Tanzania

Abstract

This paper evaluates a program targeted
 to adolescent girls in Tanzania that aims to empower them
 economically as well as socially. The program was found to
 be highly successful in Uganda in terms of economic, health,
 and social outcomes. In contrast, this evaluation finds that
 the program did not have any notable effect on most of these
 outcomes in the Tanzanian setting. The evaluation also
 measures the impact of the program with and without
 microcredit services. The findings show that the addition of
 microcredit improves the take-up of the program and savings
 of the participants. The paper explores programmatic
 implementation information that helps explain the marked
 difference in outcomes between Uganda and Tanzania. This
 research shows that layering additional microfinance
 services onto an adolescent development program can be an
 effective tool to attain greater inclusion of youth in
 financial services, and brings out important issues of the
 generalizability of the research findings.