struggle to successfully engage or solicit enough applications from these groups, and wind up serving those who are “better off” among the eligible group. Across GIL projects, efforts will be made to document operational lessons on how to effectively engage younger or more vulnerable girls. Where sample size permits, GIL evaluations will endeavor to examine the heterogeneous impacts of employment programs on different types of young women, disaggregating results by age, education, and poverty. Gathering more evidence on these types of heterogeneous impacts can directly assist project teams in weighing the trade-offs of different eligibility criteria and offering the most appropriate intervention to each target group. Additionally, the general equilibrium effects of targeting certain groups are often unknown and not studied. Knowledge of whether youth-centric interventions displace older workers or increase consumption or available investment funds, for example, can help policy makers include helpful safeguards or scale up programs effectively.

Another area for further research is how social norms and institutions interact with interventions to promote human capital or labor market outcomes. For example, Ashraf et al. (2014a) found that for ethnic groups that traditionally make bride price payments at marriage, the increased supply of schools in Zambia during the 1990s resulted in a significant increase in female education, but not for ethnic groups that do not make bride price payments. Future research will need to pay attention to such heterogeneity when exploring, for example, the relationship between employment and fertility, as well as the impact of programs.

**_Improving measurement of non-cognitive skills and women’s empowerment._** Through its wide-ranging portfolio of research on women’s economic empowerment in Africa, GIL is uniquely positioned to improve comparative policy analysis by encouraging the use of similar survey questions and indicators, and creating an evidence base of costs and impacts to allow comparison across contexts. Whenever possible, GIL impact evaluations track a common set of outcomes across projects:

- Employment and earnings;

- Economic empowerment, including asset ownership and control over resources;

- Social empowerment, including voice and agency;

- Socio-emotional skills;

- Networks;

- Fertility preferences, behaviors, and outcomes;

- Experience of harassment and gender-based violence;

- Spillovers onto partners, siblings and children.

Best-practice indicators already exist in the literature on women’s empowerment and youth employment for some, but not all of these outcomes. In particular, the development and use of locally-adapted measures of young women’s social empowerment and socio-emotional skills will serve as a cross-cutting activity across GIL’s impact evaluations on youth employment. A key challenge is that commonly used international scales for measuring such outcomes have not been validated in African settings. Where possible, qualitative research to elicit girls’ perspectives on their capacity to make and act on decisions regarding their lives will inform the development of new tools to measure empowerment. To further investigate psychological dimensions of empowerment and how they mediate or moderate labor market outcomes, we will collaborate with experts in psychology and public health to develop and validate 37