eve of the outbreak, Sierra Leone ranked near the global bottom of a gender inequality index.<sup>2</sup> Relative to the Sub-Saharan Africa average, it has high rates of adolescent fertility (Panel B) and the highest rate of maternal mortality in any country for which data exists (Panel C). This is partly driven by the extremely low levels of public health care provision (Panel D): pre-crisis there were 0 _._ 2 doctors and 3 nurses per 10 _,_ 000 people (the corresponding figures for most OECD countries are 30+ doctors and 100+ nurses), in a country with an estimated 1 _._ 4 million women of child-bearing age and 1 _._ 1 million under-five children. According to the WHO, teen pregnancy is one of the leading causes of death for mothers in Sierra Leone and illegal abortions are common. It is also a setting where there is a high prevalence of sexual exploitation and violence towards young women. For example, over half of women in Sierra Leone (56%) report having suffered some form of gender based violence during their lifetime [Amnesty International 2015].<sup>3</sup> It was in the context of pre-crisis Sierra Leone that our data collection exercise was originally planned. This was for a randomized control trial evaluation of an intervention to empower young women along economic and social dimensions, building on our earlier work evaluating the same intervention in Uganda [Bandiera _et al._ 2018].<sup>4</sup> The program, known as the Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) intervention, is delivered by the NGO BRAC. It provides clubs in which young women can meet, and offers a package of skills training. This training includes life skills, such as awareness of health and reproductive issues; financial literacy; and vocational skills. Older girls can also access microfinance to start micro-enterprises.

Fieldwork for our baseline survey was completed a week prior to the first cases of Ebola being reported in May 2014. The fact that our evaluation was underway at the time of the outbreak was entirely coincidental: the ELA program is not intended as a response to the crisis. We exploit the timing of events and randomized roll out of the ELA program to document: (i) how the severity of the Ebola shock correlates to changes in the economic lives of the 4 _,_ 700 tracked girls and young women; (ii) whether the ELA intervention mitigated any of these impacts. Our work thus provides a rare opportunity to explore the overlay of a randomized intervention with an aggregate shock, in a sample tracked over pre- and post-crisis periods.

> 2Panel A of Figure A1 shows the UNDP Gender Inequality Index, that aggregates information on maternal mortality rates, adolescent fertility rates, education by gender, female held parliamentary seats, and gender inequality in labor market participation. The index ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating perfect equality. Sierra Leone scores _._ 65, while the average in Sub Saharan Africa is closer to _._ 55.

> 3Reflecting these concerns, the Secretariat for the Reduction of Teenage Pregnancy was established in Sierra Leone in 2013. They developed the national strategy, _Let Girls be Girls, not Mothers!_ The Sierra Leone Sexual Offences Act 2012 provides that a person below the age of 18 is not capable of giving consent, and that it is not a defence to any of the offences in the Act to show a child has consented.

> 4Bandiera _et al._ [2018] find that four years post-intervention, ELA significantly improved the economic empowerment of women, gave them greater control over their bodies in terms of contraceptive use, pregnancy knowledge and being able to avoid sex against their will, and raising aspired ages of marriage and childbearing.

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