street vending (48% of those with at least 1 IGA), food processing for sale, including baking, cooking, and drying (16%), and home production of crops, livestock, and fish (11%).

It is important to note that the EPAG program was not targeted toward the most vulnerable segments of Liberian society, but rather toward young women with enough education to be able to benefit from a training program of this nature. Based on comparisons from the 2007 CWIQ (Core Welfare Indicators Questionnaire) survey, the average EPAG participant is more educated, more literate, more likely to be engaged in an income-generating activity, and owns more assets than the average Liberian women of the same age group: mobile phone ownership was high (63%), as was the proportion reporting that they had some money of their own (79%). Even compared to other similar residents of Monrovia, the EPAG participants are better educated and have higher income.

A strong sense of female empowerment at baseline emerges from the sections of the survey instrument having to do with self-confidence and agency. Survey respondents reported a high degree of freedom of mobility, a high degree of control over money (both earned money and the money needed to pay for items like food and medicine), and a high level of agreement with statements such as “If I had the chance, I would like to become a leader in the community, as I would be a good one”. With such high rates of self-confidence at baseline, there was limited scope for improvement on these measures. Their self-confidence was a bit more tempered on issues related to running a business or searching for a job: a composite score based on self-assessed ability to perform a series of tasks<sup>16</sup> yielded a mean of 2.4 out of 4.0 (with standard deviation 0.86) at baseline, leaving room for improvement. Because of concerns about the limited usefulness of the empowerment questions asked at baseline, some questions were dropped and new measures were added for the midline survey only.

Panel 6 of Table 2A summarizes the family background characteristics of the study population, who tend to come from large families and frequently have lost one or both parents. A large majority (78%) were displaced during childhood or adolescence due to the long-running Liberian civil conflict (1989-1996; 1999-2003). Furthermore, about two-thirds of study respondents were already mothers before entering the program, with small but significant differences between the treatment and control groups. Similarly, 7.5% of study respondents were pregnant at baseline, with a slightly higher rate in the control group. Because of these significant differences in parental and pregnancy status, these variables are included as controls in the subsequent analysis presented in Section 4. Panel 7 also investigates sexual behaviors of study participants. Almost all have been sexually active, with a slightly higher age at sexual debut for the control group. Sexual behaviors are very similar across treatment and control groups, with most girls reporting one regular sexual partner, and one-third of respondents reporting ever having a casual sexual partner. Seventy percent have used a condom, with about 55% reporting having used one in their last

> 16 The specific questions asked the respondent to rate how well she would be able to perform the following activities: find information about job opportunities in your area, run her own business, save in order to invest in future business opportunities, manage business finances effectively, bargain with a supplier to obtain good prices when purchasing, collect money from someone who owed her for purchases who are not repaying on time. Numerical values were assigned to each response. The score is based on the average across all the activities on which the respondent reported, conditional on having responded to at least half the activities.

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