Adolescent Girls Community of Practice

[email protected] 212-339-0500

Promoting space, access, and agency for adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) to build sustainable communities.

In the Adolescent Girls Community of Practice (AGCoP), our clients are the girls. The AGCoP helps strengthen the capacity of different actors to design, implement, and evaluate effective, scalable programs that build the protective health, economic, cognitive, and social assets of adolescent girls, particularly the most off-track. We work with institutions ranging from large, multilateral and bilateral organizations and governments to small community-based organizations and national or regional networks.

Why girls?

While investment in adolescent girls is increasing, there remains a gap between what is promised and what is achieved. The gap is widest for girls at the highest risk of the worst outcomes, rendering them invisible. Reaching the most off-track girls is not possible without trusted community relationships, sufficient capacity on the ground, and user-friendly evidence-informed tools and exercises to help practitioners design, test and expand programs. Look to our Essential Reading for more.

WHAT IS INTENTIONAL DESIGN?

Intentional Design is an evidence-based, step-wise approach that guides practitioners through a cycle of segment-specific information collection and analysis by implementing user-friendly tools and exercises to help them create more effective and scalable girl-centered programs. Each collection of a piece of evidence builds on the proceeding one. This learning approach allows for promotes fairness and lays the basis for effective research and evaluation.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The AG Community of Practice provides an open-source and readily available platform on which to engage with our tools, program content, and more in Practitioner Resources. Practitioners report that on-the-ground application of the learning tools generates surprising and useful qualitative and quantitative knowledge vital to shaping their work, assessing its reach, and articulating plans for expansion. For more of those stories, see Field Experiences.

Announcements

The Adolescent Girls Community of Practice has officially joined the Population Council’s Girl Innovation, Research, and Learning (GIRL) Center. Please visit the GIRL Center site for more information, where you will find a breadth of resources for your own adolescent girls research and advocacy.

Featured Resource of the Month

Intentional Design: Reaching the Most Excluded Girls in the Poorest Communities—A Guide for Practitioners and Advocates

The Intentional Design Guide is a source book that offers step-wise technical guidance for utilizing the Intentional Design approach, an evidence-based model for the design of girl-centered programs that generates a cycle of information collection and analysis, supporting practitioners in:

Making thoughtful selections on where to work, using disaggregated, sub-national level data and pulling key information from the girls’ “walkable” home communities;
Sorting girls into like-situated populations – or segments – for more targeted programming;
And planning segment-specific programs including in the methods of recruitment, mentoring structures, meeting venues, and program content identified and used.

The tools outlined in this guide have been applied in sites in 44 countries. Twenty-one detailed field reports—including an extensive discussion of the Abriendo Oportunidades program in Guatemala—set the scene in each context by describing key challenges and problems faced, present how tools were used, and explain the eventual resolutions of the Intentional Design process.