Girls transitions to adulthood: education, work, and marriage
Abstract
The Symposium was co-hosted by the Girl Hub Ethiopia, CARE Ethiopia, DFID, FHI 360, International Rescue Committee, Pathfinder, Plan International, Population Council, Save the Children, USAID, and Young Lives to facilitate cross-organisational learning, experience-sharing and technical capacity development for girl-centred programming and to enhance networking and opportunities for collaboration among a girl-centred community of practice.
The Symposium provided the opportunity for a diverse group of stakeholders to meet and discuss learning from their activities in relation to girls in Ethiopia. The focus of the day was on networking and discussion for increased collaboration and improving current practice. There were separate sessions in different groups and brief presentations from a wide range of perspectives from practitioners and researchers. The sessions were chaired by girls who are beneficiaries of a girls’ leadership programme.
The Young Lives Country Director, Dr Alula Pankhurst, made a presentation [Girls transitions to adulthood: education, work, and marriage; also appended to this record] on girls’ transitions to adulthood, using data from Young Lives. His presentation gave an overview of the situation of girls in relation to work, early marriage and fertility based on findings from the fourth round of the Young Lives survey. He highlighted positive trends indicating that there is a slight transformation in the situation of girls in Ethiopia compared to the other Young Lives countries (India, Peru and Vietnam), with lower rates of marriage and early child-bearing, and many girls going on to secondary and tertiary education. The presentation was followed by interesting discussions of the ways Young Lives data can be used alongside other data to deepen our understanding of the reality of girls’ lives.
Citation
Pankhurst, A. Girls transitions to adulthood: education, work, and marriage. Presented at Learning Symposium on Girls in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, 1 April 2015. YoungLives, Oxford, UK (2015). 24 slides