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The CGD Podcast
CGD Podcast: Addressing Adolescent Girls’ Realities with Ruth Graham-Goulder and Rani Deshpande
00:37:18
CGD's Kehinde Ajayi speaks with UNICEF's Ruth Graham-Goulder and CGAP's Rani Deshpande about the importance of including adolescent girls' perspectives to inform policy, of working across sectors to provide multi-issue solutions, and of developing...
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- [00:01]
Ruth Graham Golder
Health, education, climate, the United nations, the.
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Keinde Adjaye
World bank, private actors, locally rooted institutions, locally rooted experts.
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Rani Deshpande
What we're really talking about is a very complex ecosystem.
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Keinde Adjaye
How do we find the interlinks to.
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Rani Deshpande
Innovate and come up with the best.
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Ruth Graham Golder
Solutions to actually rethink what we do.
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Rani Deshpande
As a broader development community?
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Keinde Adjaye
You're listening to the CGD podcast where.
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Ruth Graham Golder
We explore smart policies for a better world.
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Rani Deshpande
Each episode highlights an important development topic hosted by a CGD researcher and featuring.
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Keinde Adjaye
Experts from around the globe.
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Rani Deshpande
Tune in to learn how independent research can bring global prosperity.
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Keinde Adjaye
Hello and welcome to the CGD Podcast. I'm Keinde Adjaye, your host today. I'm a senior fellow and director of the Gender Equality and Inclusion Program here at the center for Global Development. I I'm joined today by two guests, Rani Deshpande, who's a senior financial sector specialist at cgap, and Ruth Graham Golder, who's a senior advisor on gender equality at unicef. And today we'll be talking about adolescent girls. This is an issue that is dear to all of us and we are delighted to spend some time sharing some thoughts and interesting research, policy, engagement, evidence with you today. And so I'll start by kind of framing where we are on adolescent girls. Globally. We've made a lot of progress over the last few decades. Decades. And I like to think of myself as living proof of that. I grew up in Nairobi in Kenya in the 1980s and 90s. And at that time there was a huge focus on sending girls to school. There was a campaign that was going around with billboards throughout the city, jingles on the radio and TV about send your girl child to school. And at that time, and still today, there's been a big focus on keeping girls in school, preventing early childhood pregnancy and child marriage. Forty years later, there's been successes in getting girls in school. We've seen huge changes over time, but the policy discourse and policy making around adolescent girls is still focused on these three things. Today we'll talk about why it's important to start broadening this approach. And one example of that is some work that CGD recently has done with the Population Council and the World Bank. Last month, we launched a report on pathways to prosperity for adolescent girls in Africa. One of our key findings is that over 50% of African girls age 15 to 19 are out of school or are married or have a child. Despite the fact that over 80% of 10 to 14 year olds are enrolled in school, we still see significant challenges for older adolescent girls and so we're recognizing that it's crucial to go beyond keeping girls in school and to think about what other things might be important for ensuring the well being, success, prosperity of adolescent girls across the globe. So most programming and policy ignores the reality of the situations facing adolescent girls across the globe today. So I'll start with you, Ruth, from your perspective, working at unicef, engaging with government officials and policymakers, why do you think there's this persistent focus on the three goals of keeping girls in school, delaying marriage and delaying childbearing?
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Ruth Graham Golder
There are multiple factors behind that persistent focus. I think the first is quite simple, that there's a very strong, important and good desire to protect girls and to protect their childhoods. Of course, we want girls to be keeping in school, to not be married as children, to not be having children when they are a child themselves. I think also there's a lot of evidence and a lot of work has been done to make the case for why it's important to invest in those kinds of solutions. And we see the multiple dividends in terms of lifetime earnings and, you know, reduction in maternal mortality, et cetera. And that being said, I think that once girls are out of school, or especially once they become pregnant or they become married, it's much harder to reach them. And I think there's a lot of discomfort that I think we're going to unpack over the course of this conversation from policymakers about what to do once girls are in that situation. And I also think for some policymakers there are some damaging myths around the kinds of interventions that target these groups and a fear that they might somehow incentivise teenage pregnancy and for example, cash transfers. There's a lot of incorrect information out there about the potential they might have for incentivising pregnancy. And it's just not the case when we look at the evidence in low and middle income context. So I think those are some of the things we're grappling with when it comes to that focus at the moment.
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Keinde Adjaye
Building on that, Ronnie, your work focuses on financial inclusion for adolescent girls and young women, which also isn't something that people typically think about. And how did you come to start working on this issue? Why do you think it's important to address?
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Rani Deshpande
Well, at seab, we first of all, just as background, we look at the role of financial inclusion in meeting larger development outcomes. And we had done an analysis on youth financial inclusion and when we looked at the financial inclusion rates of people between 15 and 24 in low income countries, there was a really sort of striking pattern that emerged where you see that sort of the data starts getting collected between 14 and 16, depending on what country you're talking about. And in those late adolescent years, so let's say between 15 and 17, the rates of financial inclusion, by which I mean people opening any kind of an account in the form of financial system, it could be a bank account, it could be a mobile money account, what have you, are remarkably equal, they're statistically equal between adolescent boys and girls. And then something happens right around the age of majority in most countries is 18, where there's a gap that opens up and the young men's rates of financial inclusion keep rising until, you know, into their 30s depending on the country you're talking about. Whereas the young women's rates flatten out and by 24 they are the highest that they ever get anywhere along the rest of the age spectrum. And that is where this gender financial inclusion gap that we talk about a lot, that's where it actually arises and it never closes anywhere else along the age spectrum. And so once we saw that, it obviously begged the questions of why does this happen and what can we do about it? And it's important because we know that well designed financial inclusion interventions can improve young women's adolescent girls outcomes, definitely their financial outcomes, but when implemented as part of a well designed sort of plural program with other kinds of supports, can also contribute to improving other sorts of outcomes, like in the domains of psychosocial functioning, health, education, livelihoods.
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Keinde Adjaye
So both of you have highlighted some really important points I want to take a little time for us to reflect on more deeply. First is that there are a lot of girls who are falling through the cracks of these main policy priorities that we see there are, despite all the best efforts, all the investments we've seen, all the policy change, all the commitment that we've seen over the past few decades to improving the well being of adolescent girls. There's still a lot of girls who are leaving school, who are getting married and who are having children really. Although it's uncomfortable to recognize sometimes that these are the realities, it's crucial to face them head on if we are going to think about effective ways to address it. And I think Ronnie, your point really highlighting the fact that there has been a lot of convergence between boys and girls, a lot of progress in addressing, especially at earlier years, the gender differences that we historically have seen in dimensions of adolescent girls well being beyond education, beyond childbearing and marriage, there has been a lot of progress, but the gaps start to emerge as girls get Older people transition from adolescence into adulthood. And so both of you, it sounds like in your work, have recognized the importance of these things. And so I'd like to take some time to think about what have you found to be effective in speaking to policymakers, working with policymakers, engaging with them on some of these issues and overcoming the barriers that we've seen in getting and changing the way we engage with work on adolescent girls. Ruth, do you want to start with that?
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Ruth Graham Golder
Yeah. Happy to kick off with a reflection. About to your earlier question about the focus on preventing child marriage and keeping girls in school. I do think in the field of work on adolescent girls at large, most policy making, program design is kind of anchored in a central question which is how do we stop bad things happening to girls? And it kind of stops there. And I think that causes a lot of problems later on because we're not thinking enough about an equally important question, which is how do we support and invest in this generation of girls and in kind of the world around them, their communities, so that they have agency over their own lives and that they're working towards a future where they are fully empowered women. And that includes in the economic dimensions of their lives. And I think this speaks to the lack of focus on things like financial inclusion and more broadly, kind of economic empowerment and kind of social policy instruments when it comes to girls work, because we don't really consistently think about women yet as fully fledged economic actors in many places. And that is kind of feeding into what we think about girls at this kind of cusp of 15 to 19 year old age group. So I think when it comes to the kind of policy opportunities, you know, for unicef, we've been working, we've been working on adolescent girls rights and wellbeing, of course, for a very long time. But we've had a very concerted effort in the last three years to really accelerate that work. And I think very cognizant of the lack of progress in many areas. And in particular you see, yes, some gains in things like primary education, but that translation into parity when it comes to education, employment and training just isn't there. Adolescent girls are twice as likely to be of education, employment and training as adolescent boys in almost every region in the world. And so what are the models that can help us to get to where we want to go faster, that deliver real results for girls and at a scale? And I think there are three key things that we've taken from the work so far. And this, this really represents so many conversations with girls with policymakers and partners. I think number one is listening to girls designing with girls and at every stage of a policy or program cycle all the way through to evaluation and feedback loops, Skills really are experts in their own lives. They're the number one experts before any of the kind of professionals that have built skills and EV and research and so on, that we should be starting with girls perspectives. And it's an opportunity because it will make the policies and programs far more effective. I think the second thing that we hear time and time again is that girls don't live single issue lives. And I think for too long there's been quite a simplistic focus on like if we can just get girls into primary school, the job will be done. And I think what Ronnie was describing so eloquently is that that really isn't the kind of the be all and end all. It's very important as an investment. But if we're looking at kind of fully empowered adults, we need to look at a whole rang types of support. And I think the big opportunity is that we see that some of these multisectoral packages can actually not only accelerate outcomes across a whole range of areas for girls, but are also more cost effective. So for example, we've been doing some work with the University of Oxford in Cape Town. Basically it's a policy brief that we published in October that models a package of cash transfers, sexual reproductive health services and parenting support. And that shows outcomes across a whole range of areas. Teenage pregnancy, sexual violence, labour market productivity, increased years in schooling and it's more cost effective to build off one platform. But of course there are costs in terms of coordination and capacity building. So I think a big lesson for us is making sure that you have that investment up front in the capacity building, in the coordination between line ministries and that we look at models that are scalable. I think that's what's really interesting about some of this financial inclusion work. There are some solutions out there, they may not be very well known and that's part of what we want to do, is to elevate those solutions that can be rolled out at scale.
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Keinde Adjaye
And that leads to you, Rani, just building on what Ruth has just flagged in her thoughts on the question of what works. You recently wrote a report on what works to increase financial inclusion for adolescent girls and young women. So what are some of the ways in which policymakers and practitioners can shift their approaches to effectively support adolescent girls and young women across the world?
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Rani Deshpande
So I think when it comes to financial inclusion, and I wholeheartedly agree with what Ruth just said about the sort of synergistic impacts of multisectoral programs. Financial inclusion works much better when it's paired with other services and other services. Their impact can be enhanced by the addition of a financial inclusion component. But we're thinking specifically about that. I think that there's this presumption amongst many people in the financial sector anyway that young women are just not attractive clients, that they're too young, they're hard to reach, they don't have enough money, et cetera, et cetera. But we actually just had a webinar sort of, you know, in support of the paper where we had several practitioners who were adamant that there was a business case for financially including young women. But you have to do a couple of things. First of all, the how depends on the who. So young women are not a monolith, just as women are not a monolith. And there are segments that are, you know, younger, still in school, more economically dependent on others, who require different approaches than segments of women at the other end of that spectrum, if you will, who are older, more economically active, less dependent on others, maybe in caregiving roles already. So the first thing is differentiating and understanding, as Ruth was saying, designing with young women and girls, understanding who you're designing for. The second thing is that the inclusion of those complementary services is much more necessary for some of those segments who face higher barriers to economic empowerment overall and they're going to be costly. So if you're thinking about it with the lens of also financial and economic sustainability, which we often have to sort of from the financial sector perspective, that's where partnerships come in. It's impact enhancing and it's sustainability enhancing. To think about partnerships between the private and public or nonprofit sector, to think about which of those complementary services that are not going to be provided by the market can be provided by civil society organizations, government agencies, and what services enable a financial services can be provided by the private sector on a self sustaining basis. And how can that be put together? So again, to echo Ruth, I think that doing kind of work on those models, thinking about what models have worked, bringing in the evidence not only on actual impact, but on the operational sustainability of it, would be one thing that's key to bringing this to the policy realm and affecting not only practice, but large scale policy. We've done a lot of work marshaling sort of that evidence from the financial inclusion point of view. Another thing that I have been struck by in our conversations as part of this initiative is actually how important also the human stories are especially, and even with policymakers, I think many of us may have sort of a just the facts ma'am approach to making these decisions. But I would say just based on what I've experienced, we cannot discount the power of those human stories.
- [15:09]
Keinde Adjaye
A lot of that resonates with things we found in the report on adolescent girls in Africa, and especially this point of the importance of recognizing the differences in adolescent girls experiences and the fact that they are not a monolith, that there are some girls who are on the path of staying in school, delaying marriage, delaying childbearing, others who are out of school, who are working, who are really battling with ways to find economic opportunities, dignified work, ways to be included financially, have access to financial services. And there are others who are married and dealing with childcare responsibilities, other realities. And for all of these girls, the importance of partnering with different actors across different sectors to find entry points to improve their well being that reflect the multiplicities of their lives and the fact that they are not living with facing single issues. And it's really wonderful to hear the insights from your different scopes of spheres of work and ways to address these issues. I know that you've both spent some time really explicitly bringing the voices of adolescent girls and young women to bear on the issues that you're working on. Ronnie, you spent some time over this past summer talking to adolescent girls and young women on their views on financial inclusion. What were your main takeaways from that?
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Rani Deshpande
So I think a couple of main takeaways. First of all, we started our analysis on a quantitative basis looking at some of the data sets out there to kind of try and figure out which young women were getting financially included by age 24 and which ones weren't. And then we were going to complement that with qualitative research to figure out sort of the why, the barriers and the enablers. And when we kind of did the segmentation analysis on the data sets, the big difference that came out was kind of between these so called dependents and so called independents, the ones who were like I was saying before, younger, more economically dependent, sort of in a child position, in the family, being taken care of and the opposite, there's the independence and everything that's sort of the opposite of those dimensions of the spectrum. But when we started actually talking to young women, what we discovered is that there's a lot more blurriness between those segments than we had originally thought, especially in the sort of economic bracket that we were looking at the disadvantaged young women. There was Almost no young woman who didn't have a side hustle or at least a vacation job to help out the family, to, you know, buy her necessities, to help make ends meet whenever she could. So I think that is one of the takeaways for me. You know, dependent doesn't mean entirely dependent. And I think it drove home for me the centrality of economic activity in these young women's lives, even if they're in school. And I think hearkening back to what was mentioned a minute ago, there has been a bit of discomfort amongst parents, policymakers and often for good reasons that we don't want to overemphasize sort of livelihood issues in the lives of young women. We don't want to distract, or young men for that matter. We don't want to distract them from school. They have to be single mindedly focused. And that is true to an extent. But the reality is that many of them are already engaged in economic activity on the side and have to be. So I think that we can't ignore that and we have to find ways to support it. And then speaking of supporting it, this is the other thing that jumped out to me from the research in Ghana and Tanzania this year was that a lot of people think that the way to support that side hustle or that economic activity is through credit. Because obviously you need business capital to run your business and therefore we need to give you money. And let's be honest, there's a much stronger business case for credit amongst financial institutions than there is for certain other kinds of financial services. But almost again, to a woman, everyone we spoke with in our qualitative research, many people, I should say, demonstrated a pretty strong aversion to taking credit, at least at the levels of business that they were at, which is, you know, small, often side hustles just beginning a lot of times. And you know, when you think about that, when you think about the income streams that come from those businesses, small, irregular, it is big economically rational to not take a loan, to not take on a fixed debt obligation. And so we asked them, so, okay, so how did you like amass your initial business capital? I would say like 9.5 times out of 10. They said by saving, they worked odd jobs, they saved up the payments that they got, they, you know, started a little side hustle with that little amount of money, turned it into a slightly larger amount of money, turned to another side hustle, maybe that turned into capital for a full time livelihood activity, what have you. But they kept on turning those small amounts accumulated into slightly larger amounts. And so I think that again, coming back to kind of what are the policy and practice implications of this, I feel like there has to be a lot more thought put into how the whole ecosystem, practitioners, policymakers, donors, can support that pathway to economic empowerment, the savings based pathway. No, it has downsides. It takes time. There's a lot of competing pressures on those savings, which makes it take even more time. But this is where young women seem most comfortable and there are good reasons for it. So I think that that's an underexplored area.
- [20:33]
D
We see similar things in the work we've done in looking at adolescent girls in Africa and finding that 40% of girls are not working and in school. A lot of girls are working even though they are in school. And economic activity is a pathway towards ensuring that they can stay in school longer. Often we see these things at odds, but they can be complementary.
- [20:56]
Rani Deshpande
Can I ask you a question?
- [20:58]
Keinde Adjaye
Sure.
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Rani Deshpande
Did you find that the rates of economic activity got higher as the adolescents got older?
- [21:04]
D
We do see that. We do see that as we go from 10 to 14 year olds to 15 to 19 year olds, we do see a transition from more girls being in school exclusively to some of them working as well, and some of them being out of school completely and starting to work. And then the shift gets even larger when we move from 15 to 19 to 20 to 24. What's interesting though, is for boys, we do see a more robust transition from school to work. For girls, we see a lot of girls getting out of school, but not transitioning to paid work. And so even though there is this increase in work, and I should be clear that there, we haven't talked about this yet, but there is a lot of unpaid work that girls are doing. So beyond, you know, the side hustle or economic activities that they're doing, girls in a lot of settings, most settings I would say, are involved in unpaid domestic work or in unpaid providing unpaid care to others in their household, in their communities. And so I would say, you know, probably if we look at data that very few girls who are not doing some kind of work, even more than we see the girls who are doing paid work there, there is a much smaller number, they're not doing any work at all.
- [22:10]
Keinde Adjaye
There is an aversion to recognizing the paid work that girls do, the fear that this is supporting child labor, but on the other hand, they are doing this work. The reality is that they are doing the work. And so I think it's crucial to really shift the policy focus to One where the goal is to ensure that this is safe and dignified work because it's often precarious types of work where they are putting themselves in physical harm or just have little predictability in their income sources and are doing work that is not age appropriate. So I completely agree with your insights and it's very interesting to hear those pathways and for you to be able to demonstrate that through the qualitative work that you've done.
- [22:56]
Rani Deshpande
I just want to add that on that evidence bit we sort of went through that. What are the risks, really the documented risks of encouraging economic activity or supporting economic activity, let's say, amongst school age adolescent girls. And while there have been a few very well publicized studies that showed an increased risk of that, the vast majority of the studies that we were able to find and review showed the opposite, that economic or livelihood support programs that supported and encouraged economic activity amongst adolescent girls and young women increased the amount of time devoted to those activities, but did not actually take away from the amount of time spent on school. So there was no deleterious effect on education. I just wanted to throw that out there.
- [23:43]
D
Thank you so much for sharing that.
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Keinde Adjaye
And one other point to that is the reality that is in most countries at the secondary school level, even when there are no schooling fees, there are a lot of education related expenses that students, their families have to take care of on their own. So this is another big issue to keep in mind. Ruth, you've also done a lot of work at UNICEF in terms of making sure the voices of adolescent girls inform your work. For example, you conducted an adolescent girls rights poll and received responses from almost 590,000 adolescent girls, boys, young women and young men. I would love to hear what are the key insights from your work. You mentioned some of them before, but if there are other things that you haven't touched upon that you could share.
- [24:27]
Ruth Graham Golder
Yeah, absolutely. And to what Ronnie was saying, I think it's not an either or. Right. We can look at policy responses that address some of the drivers for girls feeling that necessity to work, the cash transfers to families, the childcare provision for adolescent mothers. There are a package of things that we can do that address that need whilst also recognizing the reality of girls experiences and meeting them where they are. I think the solution can never be just to ignore the reality and wish it was something else. But it's not just like let's get financial inclusion and savings options and and access to bank accounts for girls. It's also the package of social policy instruments that help to address the poverty and lack of support that puts girls in that situation in the first place. You really see that in the findings from the global poll. It reached over half a million girls, boys, young men and women. It was co designed with our global Girl leaders advisory group. They were the ones who decided it should also go to boys and young men, which we fully supported. We crafted the questions together with our expert ethics research team. And a few takeaways. I think one is that in terms of the top five policy priorities that came out from that poll, they were 1 access to school 2 comprehensive sexuality education and that was, if you like, just as popular, slightly more popular for the adolescent boys broke down by gender and age. Three, financial literacy training, which I think speaks volumes about what young people and girls and boys see as a need in their lives and then some interesting kind of breakdown by age. So we saw that for younger adolescent girls in the 10 to 14 year old bracket that they felt a top priority were cash transfers for the family or money for the family was the way the answer was framed. Whereas older girls 15 to 19 really highlighted vocational skills. So I think that speaks volumes to, you know, the reality of girls and young people's lives today. The importance of listening to them, the fact that you can look at all of the evidence and come to quite similar conclusions. Actually they already know what is needed. But I think the other thing that really strikes me is, you know, when we look at the analysis of odour kind of finance flows at the moment, very small percentage of that is going to adolescent girls at all. And of that 0.5% is going to kind of economic empowerment related work. And yet if you look Systematic Review on 20 Years of Evidence for child marriage or what's the best way to keep girls in school at scale, it's cash transfers and in kind transfers. And yet they're not an instrument that is really talked about in relation to adolescent girls very, very rarely. So I think, you know, listening to the evidence of what works at scale, looking at the reality of what girls and especially adolescent girls and young people are saying is so critical that we, we have a set of solutions out there actually that we can invest in. I think it's really about looking at the contextually specific needs and cracking on with the investments.
- [27:18]
Keinde Adjaye
There is so much that we already know, there's so much evidence. We'll point you to links of work that we've all done outlining what are some key actions we can take to set adolescent girls on pathways to prosperity, recognizing that there are crucial differences in the pathways that adolescent girls are pursuing both across countries, within countries, across locations, by income levels, by multiple dimensions, highlighting the fact that there isn't one magic solution that addresses all the situations, all the challenges that girls are facing. However, it's crucial to acknowledge the realities that may be uncomfortable, that may be beyond the scope of what we default to thinking about, but that there's lots of evidence based solutions on ways to support adolescent girls. So we like to end the CGD podcast with two questions we ask all our guests. So I'll move on to that then ask you both if you could wave a magic wand and instantly change any one policy in the world, what do you think would do the most good? So starting with you, Ronnie, so I.
- [28:29]
Rani Deshpande
Think you both may know my thoughts on apps that would encourage parents of children to support those children. And let me just leave it at that. However, if there's an app developer out there that wants to work on that idea, call me. In the meantime, I actually want to build on something that Ruth mentioned a second ago, which is a form of cash transfer. So I I would love to see child savings accounts much more widely implemented. So child savings accounts for people who haven't heard of them, are bank accounts, financial institution accounts that are opened at the birth of a child into which small, moderate amounts of money are deposited by the government until that child reaches the age of majority and then they're released for certain purposes, usually education, training or setting up a business. I would love to see those much more widely implemented. For lots of reasons. A research on those in industrialized economy settings have indicated that it produces a change in mindset in those countries, what's called a college mindset, but basically the orientation that I have something to look forward to, I have something to work with to make something of myself when I get to be an adult. And that delays all kinds of risky behaviors. And I'd love to see those implemented where there are at least a little bit more is deposited for girl children to equalize the economic incentives to having girls versus boys, which are not equal in many countries. And also in view of just the likely higher economic burdens of child rearing, of caregiving that young women will face with the situation as it stands in many parts of the world as well. So that would be my magic wand wish.
- [30:11]
Keinde Adjaye
I love that. I hope policymakers across the globe are listening to this and thinking about ways in which they can adopt that in their country. Ruth, over to you.
- [30:20]
Ruth Graham Golder
Yeah, Rani, I love that one. Maybe just to complement it. I think mine would be universal Cash plus program for all parents. So that's cash transfer program with the plus being quality, well paid childcare provision. And I think this is actually well beyond adolescent girls. The disproportionate unpaid care burden we know starts before adolescence for girls, but it's a driver of inequality in every country. It would mean a generation of teenage mothers could much more easily look forward to returning to school or non formal education or any of the pathways they would want to consider. And it's a sector where, you know, we could support a lot of really decent jobs. I think in generation looking at AI and digitization in many sectors like they are jobs that are going to continue, they are disproportionately women and they're currently often unpaid, underpaid, very difficult conditions. So I think proper investment in that sector could be a game changer.
- [31:12]
Keinde Adjaye
Yeah, I second that. As a parent who is facing constant questions about care provision and as someone who has received care, I think all of us, we forget this, that we are here today because of the nurturing care we received in our childhood. So the second question, a little lighter one on lighter note, if, is if you could each share one funny, memorable or interesting story about something that has happened to you on the job.
- [31:37]
Rani Deshpande
Oof, I wish this was funny. One of the things that most stays with me from my work in this area is many, many moons ago I lived in Benin in West Africa and I helped organize a take your daughter to work event. Except it wasn't your daughters you were taking to work. We paired promising young women in middle school from peri urban and rural communities. And we paired them with women who are very prominent in their fields. They were like judges and doctors and people high up in ministries and what have you. And they accompanied those women to their offices for a day. And like for many of them it was the first time they'd seen a computer. Just fascinated and it was just super inspirational. And the two girls from the town I lived in, I kept in touch with for a while and they were so fired up after these events. Just like the inspiration to go to school, to stay in school, to become like these women that they had met were so strong. Well, fast forward five years and they're in high school and neither of them graduates because both have gotten pregnant and both have had to drop out. And so, you know, it just. I think this is what drives some of my work. Just the kind of firsthand knowledge that school is so much, but it's not enough. It's not enough for everyone. And we have to provide other pathways as well.
- [32:58]
Keinde Adjaye
And I would love to hear another fast forward five years and they managed to get back on track and completing their education. And thank you for sharing that.
- [33:07]
Ruth Graham Golder
I think something that is very memorable and stays with me from I think it was just last year I went to a primary school in Morocco. We have a program there that's supporting adolescent girls, trying to focus on a number of different areas, getting girls back into school. Some of the issues that we see around menstrual health and hygiene, violence, child marriage and so on. And it really stands out to me for a number of reasons. I think one of them is that when it comes to efforts to get adolescent girls around a table, to get their insights into policymaking, to consult with them, advisory groups, I think in general it skews massively towards older adolescent girls 16 years onwards and then often actually young women who are then representing adolescent girls. But this is a group of 10, 11 year old girls who were advocating fiercely with local government for action because they were seeing lots of their peers. Girls in their communities were falling out of school at the end of primary school through to secondary school. And I met with the girls and we talked about some of the challenges and the problems and they asked, you know, do you want to come and see some art that we've created? And so it turns out they'd done a sort of class project answering the question why are girls falling out of school in this community? And the art was just so visceral and harrowing. Sorry, this is also not remotely funny. It's definitely in the memorable category. But they had drawn and made a model of a girl in a cage doing household work with a broom, with a baby doll. There were pictures of teenage girls are pregnant, getting married, violence. There's the spectrum of things that, that, that you can imagine. But it was really memorable for two reasons, I think beyond it just being very harrowing. I think one is that we don't want to think that girls are facing this. This is part of the fear of thinking about things like financial inclusion, economic empowerment, rights. We want to believe it's very natural to want to believe that girls are protected from all of this, but they're not. That's what they're facing. They're seeing it in their communities they know is happening to them. So we need to respond to that reality. They're powerful advocates in of themselves. That's another thing. I think for this work that hearing from an 11 year old girl is so much more powerful often than hearing it from anyone else. But that group of girls, or four of them in particular, who are sort of particularly engaged with the dialogue with local governments, I asked them what they wanted to do when they were older. And two of them want to be ministers in the government, one in education and one in health. And that for me is, it's just so hopeful. Think if we have girls at that age that passionate about changing the world for people in their community, if people like them become ministers, then we're in safe hands for the future. So, yeah, a harrowing story at the beginning, but I hope a little bit of hope at the end.
- [35:53]
Keinde Adjaye
Absolutely. Talking with both of you today has really given me a lot of hope. Just hearing about the work that you were doing and about these ambitions, visions, goals of young girls, the work that they've done in putting together, finding their own pathways to prosperity through savings or bootstrapping, side hustles, and then the visions that they have, their ambitions, their goals for changing the future for themselves and for other adolescent girls by. And changing policies in their governments. And that is extremely positive note to end on and gives me a lot of hope. So thank you both for joining the CGD podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you. For all our listeners out there, a reminder, you can find the links to all the resources we mentioned and more on the podcast page. Thank you.
- [36:47]
Rani Deshpande
Bye.
- [36:48]
Ruth Graham Golder
Thanks so much.
- [36:50]
Rani Deshpande
Thanks.
- [36:53]
Ruth Graham Golder
Thank you. Thanks for listening to the CGD podcast.
- [36:56]
Rani Deshpande
You can learn more about the topics.
- [36:58]
Keinde Adjaye
Discussed on our website at cgdev.org@cgdev.org see you next time.