Evaluation of Life Skills Curriculum

This evaluation focuses on Room to Read’s Girls’ Education Program (GEP), a program that has supported more than 95,000 girls in nine countries. GEP is built around a life skills curriculum that begins in grade six and has been developed with attention to the skills and attitudes girls need to unlock their potential, achieve their personal and community goals, and make informed choices about their lives. The curriculum is implemented in school by a “social mobilizer” (SM), typically a young woman from the area, who conducts activities with enrolled girls, including life skills classes, and acts as a mentor and female role model. Relative to the educational timeline, GEP serves girls who have already completed the transition to lower secondary school, and normally continues to serve them until they complete secondary school; however, this evaluation had a two-year time horizon, evaluating the intervention delivered to girls in grades six and seven. As such, the evaluation is not structured to examine longer-term impacts on outcomes such as secondary school completion that are explicit GEP goals or to capture changes in outcomes that take time to accumulate.