# **1 Introduction**

Gender disparities remain acute, with women facing lower levels of human development compared to men across all geographical regions. Lower-middle income countries experience an exacerbation of these gender gaps, where they pose significant challenges for poverty reduction and economic development(World Bank, 2011; Duflo, 2012; Weny et al., 2017).

Adolescence is a pivotal period when critical investments and behaviors around education, marriage, and fertility are shaped. For this reason, stakeholders across low- and middleincome countries, ranging from non-governmental organizations to governmental agencies, increasingly invest in multi-component girls’ empowerment programs. These programs typically combine life skills training, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) education, and sometimes livelihood support delivered through safe spaces, often alongside activities that engage households and communities. Yet, despite their growing popularity, the evidence on what specific components are necessary to improve girls’ empowerment outcomes and overall well-being remains limited. Most programs bundle multiple interventions, making it difficult to disentangle the contribution of each component and to understand whether investing in girls’ skills, with or without providing them with economic opportunities, is enough or whether changes in household and community environments are also required (see Bergstrom and Ozler, 2021; Temin and Heck, 2020; Haberland et al., 2021; Malhotra and Elnakib, 2021; Cohen et al., 2023, for reviews.).

This paper contributes to filling these gaps by evaluating the impact of a large scale adolescent girls’ empowerment program implemented under the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) project in Côte d’Ivoire, a country which ranks among the countries with the highest gender inequality globally, facing challenges such as high fertility rates, early marriage and childbearing, and limited access to quality education, and employment opportunities for women (Institut National de la Statistique and ICF, 2012, 2021; Institut National de la Statistique, 2022; United Nations Development Programme, 2022). We evaluate a set of interventions targeting out-of-school adolescent girls and young women aged 8–24, including: (i) _safe spaces_ or _girls’ clubs_ .<sup>1</sup> providing SRH education and life skills training; (ii) support for income-generating activities (IGA) for eligible girls, i.e., girls of legal working age; (iii) husbands’ and future husbands’ clubs targeting boys and young men to foster more supportive gender attitudes; and (iv) community and religious leaders’ engagement to promote an enabling environment for girls’ empowerment.

We use a randomized controlled trial, covering 280 rural and urban localities, in the northern part of Côte d’Ivoire<sup>2</sup> . The experimental design unbundles the impact of life skills

> 1 Safe spaces or girls’ clubs are multi-component interventions or platforms used to provide girls mostly with a space where they can feel safe to interact with their peers and a trusted mentor, and where they often receive various training contents, including life skills and sexual and reproductive health knowledge, financial education, micro loans or grants, etc. Under such programs, additional services such as access to health services and community-level engagement interventions often complement the components targeted to girls only.

> 2These localities are in the catchment areas of 60 schools, selected by the project implementation team

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