were then further randomized into two groups –‘Club only’ and ‘Club + microfinance’. Therefore, there are three types of communities:

1. Group A: ‘Club only’ communities offering adolescent development clubs and associated interventions

2. Group B: ‘Club + MF’ offering microcredit in addition to Group A interventions 3. Group C: Control communities with no interventions In every community, a census of all eligible girls was done by the program team and used as our sampling frame. A baseline survey of 30‐40 girls from each village was conducted during January‐July, 2009. Table A1 shows the balance checks of the three groups in terms of their baseline characteristics. The normalized difference between the two treatment groups and the control group is less than 0.1 for all variables, which is lower than the rule of thumb value suggested by Imbens and Wooldridge (2009), and significant in only 1 of 40 cases. The clubs were established in 2009 after the baseline survey. Microfinance rollout started in early 2010 in the second treatment group after all the clubs were set up. In order to establish a panel data set, the follow‐up survey was conducted during June‐ November of 2011 on the same adolescent girls surveyed at baseline.

# **3. Sample, Take‐up, and Estimation Method**

Our baseline covered 5,454 adolescent girls from these 150 villages. In the follow‐up survey, we were able to track 3,179 of these girls. Therefore, we face a very high attrition rate (42%) between baseline and follow‐up. Although such high attrition for similar target populations is not uncommon,<sup>10</sup> this poses challenges in both interpreting the representativeness of the panel sample and measuring impacts. Table A2 presents the correlates of attrition in our sample. On average, girls who were enrolled in school at baseline are more likely to be surveyed in the follow‐up. Similarly, girls who had a child at baseline are also less likely to attrit. The treatment dummies are not significant in any of the specifications showing similar tracking rates across the three groups. However, the main concern is whether there is a selection bias introduced by losing certain types of girls from our initial sample between control and treatment groups. However, the estimated coefficients on interactions of baseline characteristics with the treatment dummies are jointly not significant. The adolescent girls, who have been successfully tracked, are not statistically different in these baseline characteristics among the three groups. We also try to account for attrition in our estimates in the section on robustness checks.

# **3.1 Take‐up and Selection into the Program**

Table 1 shows the take‐up rates of different ELA activities across the three types of communities. Over half of the girls in each of the three groups know about the ELA intervention. Although ELA clubs were not set up in any control village, 54% of the girls from this group report being aware of ELA activities, demonstrating the high visibility of the program. Girls in ‘Club + MF’ communities were relatively more likely (64%) to be informed about ELA than the control communities. There is no significant difference in knowing about ELA activities between ‘Club only’ and control communities.

> 10 For example, in their evaluation of vocational training for youth in Malawi, Cho et al (2013) observed 33% attrition rate in their follow‐up after 1 year. Duflo et al (2014) have observed 51% attrition rate in their experiment in Kenya after 7 years. In the evaluation of ELA in Uganda (Bandiera et al, 2015), attrition rates are 18% and 41% after 2 and 4 years, respectively.

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