OUR WORK
Demonstrate
We engage in research and design MEL tools to help partners understand and measure key outcomes for adolescent girls.
Our collective of partner organizations co-creates development metrics that are contextually relevant, demonstrate the power of working collaboratively and center the voices of community-driven organizations and the adolescent girls they serve.
Adolescent Girls Agency
In 2018, community leaders from across East Africa identified a single, ultimate goal for their holistic and locally-rooted efforts to improve girls’ lives.
That goal? Agency for every girl.
This collective agreement launched a multi-month process to identify shared outcomes that, when measured and shared, could demonstrate the collective impact of AMPLIFY Girls partner organizations.
Through the use of research and analytical tools designed for collective input and concept mapping, a top priority emerged for the collective: girls’ agency. Despite coming from a wide range of sectors (health, education, economic empowerment, and more), the research indicated clearly that CDOs would consider themselves successful if the girls they served showed, more than anything else, notable increases in agency over time.
The Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS), developed and validated from 2018-2020, characterizes agency as both a girls’ personal belief in their ability combined with the skills needed to effect change in their own lives and world. The localized tool is currently in use by our partner organizations across a multitude of settings to measure outcomes of their life skills programs.
AMPLIFY Girls’ commitment to timely, community-driven research is exemplified by our on-going work. Currently, AMPLIFY Girls is working on the following research initiatives on Agency:
Measuring Girls’ Agency in East Africa - Co-Creating contextually specific tools for evaluation: Lessons from the AMPLIFY GIrls Collective. Full Paper & Summary
The Girls Agency Lab (GAL)
AMPLIFY Girls is ready to elevate our work around agency and impact the lives of thousands more girls through data-driven program improvements and advocacy for major investment in best practices. The Girls’ Agency Lab is the manifestation of that readiness as we now look to take this community leader-developed tool and expand its use to new regions.
The ultimate goal of the Girls’ Agency Lab (GAL) is to position the agency tool as an industry-standard method for assessing girl-focused programs and as a source of information that can be used to improve the lives of the girls served by those programs. To do this, we must rigorously evaluate the tool in different contexts, make the tool accessible to all, and advocate for its use as a way to improve programmatic approaches worldwide.
The Girls’ Agency Lab is only possible through collaboration with creative, generous, and bold partners. We welcome opportunities to involve new partners in the launch of this effort.
If you have questions or would like to be in touch with us, please contact info@amplifygirls.org.
COVID-19
Responding to the COVID19 pandemic and the projected educational losses among marginalized communities, we undertook a four country study in Eastern Africa to center the voices of local organizations and the girls they serve. Understanding challenges from a local perspective is paramount to creating effective strategies to support adolescent girls.
AMPLIFY Girls’ community-driven research focused on:
1. establishing comprehensive empirical evidence on the barriers to school return among adolescent girls following prolonged school closures occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic; and
2. Identifying promising best practices in locally driven remote learning strategies in East Africa.
