Why engaging men and communities matters for girls’ empowerment

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, millions of dollars are invested each year in programs designed to empower young women and adolescent girls. Many rely on “safe spaces” — platforms where girls meet with mentors to build life skills and learn about reproductive health. But are they enough on their own?

For many girls, what they learn in safe spaces is reshaped at home by households, partners, and communities that influence their choices.

Emerging evidence shows that these interventions — often delivered as part of bundled programs — can strengthen knowledge and agency. However, on their own, these gains do not consistently translate into broader changes in girls’ lives, including economic gains, decision-making, and fertility and marriage.

New evidence from Côte d’Ivoire helps unpack what works — and under what conditions complementary interventions are needed.
 

Testing different approaches to girls’ empowerment

In collaboration with the Government of Côte d’Ivoire, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the World Bank's Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice, the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab evaluated a large-scale girls’ empowerment program implemented under the Sub-Saharan Africa Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD)  initiative — one of the largest regional programs focused on girls’ empowerment and reproductive health in West and Central Africa. SWEDD seeks to accelerate the demographic transition by increasing women and adolescent girls’ empowerment and their access to quality reproductive, child and maternal health services across the region.

The study randomly assigned 280 communities to different program combinations, tracking more than 3,000 out-of-school girls one year after interventions ended. By deliberately varying program components across communities, the evaluation makes it possible to see which combinations work best — and why.

The program combined four approaches:

• Safe spaces for girls, providing mentoring, life skills, and reproductive health education
• Economic support, including entrepreneurship training and small grants
• Discussion groups for boys and young men — boys’ clubs
• Engagement with community and religious leaders to promote supportive norms
   

Safe spaces build foundations — but are not sufficient on their own

Safe spaces on their own produced important gains. Girls participating in these clubs strengthened their knowledge of reproductive health, adopted more equitable gender attitudes, and reported improvements in mental well-being. Risky behaviors also declined.

These results show that safe spaces can equip girls with valuable knowledge and confidence — important foundations for empowerment.

Yet, translating these gains into broader economic participation or decision-making within households remains challenging. This highlights how social norms and household dynamics can constrain the opportunities available to girls, even when their aspirations and skills increase.
 

Engaging men helps translate gains into real change

Impacts were substantially stronger when programs also engaged boys and young men.

In communities where safe spaces were combined with boys’ clubs, girls were more likely to adopt healthier reproductive behaviors and report greater decision-making power — both individually and within households. Girls were also substantially more likely to work, with impacts about 50 percent larger than those observed under safe spaces alone.

These findings underline an important insight: many of the decisions that shape girls’ futures — marriage, fertility, and work  — are influenced by partners and close male relatives. When programs engage these actors, the knowledge and confidence gained by girls are more likely to translate into tangible changes in behavior and opportunities.
 

Supportive communities can amplify impact — if well implemented

Design matters — but implementation determines whether design translates into impact.

The largest gains emerged when safe spaces, male engagement, and community leader involvement were combined. In these communities, girls experienced the strongest improvements in socio-emotional skills and decision-making power, with suggestive evidence of reductions in pregnancy at follow-up.

Community leaders can reinforce positive messages and help shift norms — but only when engagement is well designed and implemented. In Côte d’Ivoire, leader engagement produced mixed results in some domains, reflecting challenges in training, message consistency, and implementation quality.

This highlights an important lesson: adding components does not automatically strengthen programs unless implementation systems are strong. Without adequate training, coordination, and monitoring, additional actors can dilute rather than reinforce impact.
 

Lessons for designing and scaling girls’ empowerment programs

Four key lessons emerge for policymakers and practitioners:

1. Safe spaces are an important foundation—but not sufficient on their own.
   They build knowledge, confidence, and agency, but alone are unlikely to shift broader life outcomes.
2. Engaging men is critical. Involving boys and young men helps translate girls’ gains into broader changes in girls’ behavior, opportunities, and decision-making.
3. Community support matters. Programs are most effective when they address the household and community dynamics that influence girls’ choices.
4. The quality of implementation is crucial. Multi-component programs require consistent messaging, adequate training, and strong monitoring systems. Without this, impacts can weaken. Strengthening learning systems is therefore critical. Initiatives such as the SWEDD Best Practice Guides play an important role in capturing operational lessons and translating them into practical guidance for implementation at scale.
    

Moving beyond girl-only approaches

As countries across West Africa continue to scale up investments in adolescent girls — including through initiatives such as SWEDD Plus — these findings point to a clear direction. Empowering girls is not only about building their skills and aspirations. It also requires addressing the social and structural factors that shape their opportunities.