average age was 22.7, the ELA program accepted girls between 14 and 20. It is necessary to understand to what extent age played a key role in mediating the effect of such programs on sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Because these dynamics change substantially after a woman has her first child, one priority area for employment interventions is to recruit and retain young women who have not yet begun having children, which often means women under age twenty. Experience from GIL’s previous evaluations indicates that club-based programs are more effective at reaching women under age twenty than TVET models.

With an eye toward uncovering the mechanisms through which employment and fertility changes occur as well as the complementarities between these mechanisms, all GIL youth employment evaluations track reproductive outcomes. Qualitative work to uncover how young women think about childrearing in relation to employment and their personal relationships will be critical. We do not have enough evidence regarding how expected returns to schooling, work, and marriage may shape family formation decisions of young women in Africa.

**_Does child care provision improve young women’s employment outcomes?_** Once young women become mothers, one option to expand their labor market options is to promote access to child care. Upon reviewing the international evidence to date, the 2012 World Development Report on Gender and Development concluded that improving access to child care services does in fact improve maternal labor force participation, but cautions that the size of the impact depends on the extent to which formal child care displaces informal arrangements, the financial costs, and the perceived quality of the formal child care. As discussed in Section 2, the tradeoff between labor force participation (LFP) and fertility is not as clear in Africa as in other regions: high rates of women’s LFP and fertility co-exist in a number of African countries. However, even if child rearing does not keep young women out of the labor force entirely, it may still compel them into informal, part-time work in female-dominated, low-return industries early in their working lives. Research in African contexts is needed to determine if mitigating these care constraints early through the provision of child care could increase women’s productivity, reduce occupational segregation, or increase long-term earnings. A rigorous impact evaluation would shed light on the severity of the child care constraint in addition to documenting the potential for child care provision to address it.

**_How can we expand access to child care?_** If child care provision does increase young women’s participation or earnings, then a second question is how to improve the availability, quality, and use of child care. For this, a better understanding of how child care markets function in both rural and urban contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa is needed. How does the market for formal child care evolve in response to increased demand? What are the general equilibrium effects of increased female employment on norms relating to paid child care and on the availability and cost of informal and formal child care options? Is there a threshold of the percentage of women working outside the home that tips the market toward formal, rather than informal or family-based, child care arrangements? And are younger women more or less likely to be early adopters of formal child care, and to reap larger and longer-term benefits from having access to formal child care early in their working lives? A related question, building upon ongoing GIL evaluation in Burundi, is what works to promote fathers’ participation in child care? These questions could be explored in the context of an impact evaluation that exogenously increased women’s

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