project had to meet a basic minimum literacy level in order to qualify for admission to the program; whereas only half of the 15-29-year-old female respondents to the nationally-representative Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire (CWIQ) survey report that they can read and write (LISGIS 2007). Fewer than two percent of the girls in the EPAG study responded that they had no education, which is much lower than in the CWIQ survey. Second, the majority of adolescent girls and young women in Liberia reside in rural areas, whereas the survey participants were residing in urban and peri-urban areas, where access to basic social services may be much more improved. Consequently, the results are not representative of adolescent girls and young women in Liberia overall. The results are neither indicative of the average Liberian girl and young woman; nor are they indicative of the average Liberian girl or young woman in the project communities. They are only indicative of the average girl and young woman who are part of the EPAG project.

Finally, many of the variables that we examine in this study are measures of self-assessed levels of satisfaction or belief. These are entirely subjective variables, and are subject to significant measurement error. There is considerable evidence that the wording of these questions can affect the answers given, as can the order in which the questions are asked. Social desirability bias also affects the answers: respondents can interpret from the wording of the questions or the attitudes of the interviewers what sort of answers are more or less acceptable or expected. Behavior that is private or about which there are social strictures is more likely to be misreported. In addition, we are all bad at understanding our own motivations or beliefs, and we are all tempted to report beliefs that justify or at least are consistent with our behavior: if we do not go to the cinema, we can say that it is because we did not want to go, and we discount the reasons or constraints that might have influenced our decision not to go (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2001). That said, these questions do contain real information about attitudes, beliefs, and behavior, and there is no reason _a priori_ to expect that the errors differ systematically across treatment and control groups. In fact, ex-ante tests of balance show that these two groups are identical in these observed characteristics.

# **4. Results**

This section provides an overview of the impact of participating in the EPAG program on a variety of outcomes. As described above, "impact" is defined as the change in outcomes observed for the treatment group between the baseline and midline surveys, relative to a control group of respondents who did not participate in the first round of training. We present the results for the primary outcomes of interest – income and employment, and on a range of other outcomes, including savings behavior, various measures of empowerment (including self-efficacy and self-confidence), fertility and sexual behaviors, and, finally, household level outcomes.

# 4.1. Economic Activities

Table 3 presents the main results of the EPAG program using two sets of estimates. The first are the “Intention to Treat” estimates: these compare the outcomes of everyone who was originally assigned to receive the treatment with those that were assigned to the control group, regardless of whether the participants actually received the training. The second set presents instrumental variables results, in 12