Right on the Money
Making the case for rights-based investments in adolescent girls
About
This policy brief on adolescent girls summarises new research demonstrating the impact and economic return that investing in multi-sectoral programmes, specifically cash transfers, parenting support, and adolescent-responsive sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) services, could achieve for improving adolescent girls’ health and well-being.
The analysis finds that investing USD 1 billion in these interventions, targeting girls or their households in low and middle-income countries, is likely to achieve a more than four-fold return on investment. Returns include reduced maternal and infant mortality, averted sexually transmitted infections, improved child nutrition, child development, human capital accumulation, household consumption and income, employment opportunities, earnings, mental health and crime reduction.
As an example of the human development impact and economic returns on investment that could be expected from scaling up these three services at national level, further analysis is provided for Kenya. Findings indicate that an investment of USD 234 million in adolescent girls over ten years would avert 120,000 teenage pregnancies, 2,660 new HIV infections, 6,990 instances of child marriage, 8,510 cases of sexual violence, and 54,400 cases of emotional or physical violence. In addition, this investment would support an extra 240,600 years of schooling and lead to a USD 918 million return from increased labour market productivity.
In summary, the findings show that over ten years, a progressive scale-up of adolescent-responsive SRHR services, cash transfers, and gender-responsive parenting programmes would have significant impacts across at least seven SDG targets for adolescent girls in Kenya.
Priority recommendations emerging from this research include significantly scaling up investment in interventions to accelerate improvements in health, education, protection and other outcomes for adolescent girls, acting on girls’ priorities and needs, and partnering with girls at each stage of design, implementation and evaluation.
