Employment Fund’s donors,<sup>9</sup> the Adolescent Girls Employment Initiative (AGEI) was launched in 2009 to expand the program’s reach to an additional 4,410 Nepali women aged 16-24 over a three-year period.

Unique characteristics of this impact evaluation include:

- A large study sample (4,677 individuals in the pooled 2010-2012 cohorts examined in this report)

- Particular focus on the outcomes of women aged 16-24 as well as the outcomes of a broader category of youth (men and women aged 16-35)

- Socioeconomic survey data of participants and a control group of non-participants as well as administrative follow-up data on program participants

- Exhaustive tracking of program participants over time that produced high response rates.

- Examination of a large set of outcome domains, including employment and earnings, empowerment and self-confidence, risky behaviors, and impacts on the household.

We find, approximately two years into the program, the EF program positively improved employment outcomes. EF training program participation generated an increase in non-farm employment of 15 to 16 percentage points for an overall gain of 46 percent. The program also generated an average monthly earnings gain of 921 NRs monthly (  12 USD). Given that the average monthly income at baseline was 1272 NRs (  17 USD), the EF program impact generated an economically meaningful income gain of about 72 percent for the combined 2010-2012 cohorts.).We find that the program’s impacts on employment were larger for women than for men, though the impacts on other economic outcomes were similar for both sexes. We also detect no difference in impacts when comparing older (24-35) and younger women (age 1624), indicating that the program is equally effective for the younger women targeted under the AGEI.

This report’s employment estimates are comparable, though somewhat higher, than other recent experimental interventions in developing countries. Estimates of employment impacts in job training programs in Latin America by Attanasio et al. (2008) and Alzua et al. (2013) show respectively gains of 14 percentage points and 10 percentage points. In terms of earnings, this evaluation finds substantially higher impacts than the increase in earnings of 18 percent found by Attanasio et al. (2008).

The report is organized as follows: In Section II, we describe the global Adolescent Girls Initiative and the Employment Fund program in Nepal. Section III describes the design of the AGEI impact evaluation, Section IV describes our empirical approach, and Section V discusses the potential threats to the study’s validity. Section VI presents results and Section VII concludes.

# **II. Skills Training for Young Women**

## **a. Programs Worldwide**

This impact evaluation was launched under the aegis of the World Bank’s Adolescent Girls Initiative (AGI) launched in 2009 with the aim of facilitating the transition to productive employment for young females. Comprised of eight pilot projects – in Afghanistan, Haiti, Jordan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Liberia, Nepal, Rwanda, and South Sudan– the initiative’s launch was motivated by two factors: (1) the

> 9 The Employment Fund is financed by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the World Bank.

3