Adolescent Mother’s Empowerment Project

Project Objectives: 

The project contributes to supportive community norms towards teenage mothers; position and future opportunities, increased agency, improved coping with early motherhood and stigma, continued education, and increased income generation by teenage mothers. It is established with the belief that Girls have rights; girls are capable, and girls can ignite change. IDA will educate and empower 100 young mothers yearly, allowing them to rise out of poverty and illiteracy and providing their families a healthy environment and a hopeful future. Education significantly delays marriages and childbearing as girls who are educated get higher incomes, leading them to gain decision making power within relationships. 

Expected Outcomes: 

After graduating from IDA’s one year program, young mothers are able to give back to their community and help pull other girls and young women out of the cycle of intergenerational poverty and illiteracy. Our goal is to close the gender gap and educational disparity. These are always our priorities among all planning efforts. 

Our educational and training initiatives will help increase women’s income, build assets, wealth and business leadership. These programmes facilitate women’s access to productive resources and business services by addressing policy and regulatory barriers and promote women’s active participation in and benefit from the extractive industry, agriculture, trade and building women’s and youth’s agribusiness and entrepreneurship skills across the value chain.

Key Strategies:

IDA provides education, wealth creation opportunities, health care and assistance to teenage mothers and adolescent girls. Girls and young women are trained in entrepreneurship, sex, health care, finance, nutrition, livelihood skills, career path exposures and, psychosocial support. They receive the tools necessary to practice a trade, make a living and become self reliant leaders of their communities. They are also taught to share their new knowledge with their neighbors as change agents. 

Improving gender-related knowledge in the region is critical for future developmental strategies. By improving the awareness, IDA will include a broad range of information-dissemination methods, including the use of means that easily reach the vulnerable populations such as the mass media or community-based social cohesion methods such as games and peer education. The significant social determinants of teenage marriage and pregnancy require more comprehensive educational interventions. These interventions will be designed in light of social- and gender-inequity-based theories, such as social norms theory, the social constructivist theory of gender, and the theory of gender and power. Furthermore, approaches focused on behavior theories will be widely employed in interventions aimed at improving knowledge of women. 

Early marriages are intimately related to girls and womens’ social and economic circumstances, especially their lack of education and economic reliance on families and men. Therefore, IDA will also implement a longer-term strategy with the aim of improving educational resources, by establishing school programmes for vocational training and alternative learning, as well as a resource center. A set of skill training programmes will also be initiated including the knitting Course, hairdressing course, which provide teenage mothers with skills to live and work.  

Exit Strategy:

Since humanitarian projects are intended to be temporary interventions responding to the needs of populations affected by crises, project closure is an inescapable component of humanitarian aid. IDA will develop and use responsible exit criteria and work closely with senior staff who have strong leadership that are critical points in an exit process. We will invest both staff time and financial resources and pay attention to financial sustainability of local entities as it is a critical part of making transitions. IDA will ensure the exit does not have a detrimental effect on the teenage mothers and communities where we work. As far as possible, we will ensure that expertise and momentum for change in the country is not lost. The impact of an exit on local communities can be long-reaching, therefore we will always track our impacts and circumstances of local communities and we will consult with partners and stakeholders regularly by using assessments to monitor challenges  and communicate constantly.