Strengthening Economic Opportunities for Vulnerable Girls and Their Families: Programmatic Recommendations

Adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa are three to five times more likely to be infected with HIV than boys of the same age. The Go Girls! Initiative (GGI), an HIV prevention operations research project in Botswana, Malawi, and Mozambique, was inspired by this severe gender disparity in HIV infection and was designed to address those factors that make girls more vulnerable to HIV infection. From its inception GGI was guided by the social ecological framework, which acknowledges that individuals are embedded in their social environments and that their individual decisions and behaviors are shaped by the environment in which they live. Therefore, in order to aid adolescent girls in HIV prevention efforts GGI acknowledged and addressed the individual, peer, family, community, and larger structural environment through the implementation of a number of different program components. These components are: community mobilization, adult-child communication, life skills for youth in school, life skills for out-of-school girls, school partnerships and training, crosssectoral fora, reality radio and economic strengthening. In this report on programmatic recommendations only the economic strengthening process of implementation and the lessons GGI learned from the experience are presented.