# **4.** **<u>Policy Strategies</u>**

Using our summaries from Table 1, we now discuss policy strategies to improve each of the three outcomes considered. Of course, these are high-level strategies as many context specific factors will need to be considered when determining and implementing a set of policies in a given setting. However, before detailing our policy prescriptions, we must discuss two important caveats. First, our policy strategies are based on our summaries in Table 1. In an ideal world, however, one should prescribe policies based on which interventions generate the largest gain in welfare (i.e., prescribe the optimal policies) as opposed to prescribing policies based on which interventions have been the most successful in altering a short-term outcome. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, comparing interventions based on their (relative) contribution to welfare is not possible with the current state of the literature (in large part due to limited reporting on costs of interventions; see Appendix B for further discussion). Second, many of the interventions we review in the literature are not offered at scale. Thus, our ability to extrapolate whether a successful intervention will remain successful when offered at scale is limited. Appendix C discusses the issue of scaling-up programs and lends insights into which interventions discussed in Table 1 may be more readily scalable. With these limitations in mind, we now proceed to provide high-level policy strategies to help increase educational attainment, delay fertility, and delay marriage among adolescent girls.<sup>10</sup>

# **4.1.Increasing Educational Attainment**

While a number of tools are available to policy makers to increase educational attainment, costeffectiveness remains a big question mark. CCTs for schooling, with a solid evidence base, are effective at increasing enrollment/attendance, but targeting the marginal students remains elusive and effects on learning appear limited. Information constraints and lack of desirable jobs for women stifle incentives to invest in girls’ education. Finally, there are likely a significant share of school dropouts due to unintended pregnancies and child marriages. The evidence base is lacking on investigating and identifying the knock-on effects to education of interventions that are able to successfully reduce/delay teen pregnancies and marriage.

# 1. **_Build schools, make them girl-friendly, and safely accessible_** :

- a. Building schools in areas with no schools in the community and low enrollment rates, especially among girls, is very effective increasing enrollment and learning.

- b. Make schools girl-friendly, especially in areas with social norms interfering with girls’ schooling, where safety is an issue, and curriculum does not reflect local values.

10 The suggested policies in this section and the knowledge gaps discussed in Section 5 below can be used in two ways by World Bank task team leaders and policy makers designing interventions. First, our recommendations can provide some nuance to proposed interventions – perhaps by suggesting that they might work better in combination with another intervention or in a certain context. Second, they might spur impact evaluations for project components that are novel and for which evidence of effectiveness is lacking. To provide just one example, a project for girls’ empowerment in Angola has many components for which we advocate below (World Bank 2021). However, having access to our review, some components could perhaps be further enhanced or refined: the adolescent health services and information components could further consider including family planning counseling sessions and free/discounted services for adolescent girls. Scholarships for girls enrolling in secondary school could try to experiment with targeting approaches to make the intervention more cost-effective (and evaluate the relative effectiveness of these approaches). Remedial (second chance) education components could consider conditional transfers to increase take-up, and so on.

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