A Safe Place to Shine: Creating Opportunities and Raising Voices of Adolescent Girls in Humanitarian Settings

"The goal of Girl Shine is to reduce the risk of violence for adolescent girls and provide them the skills and assets needed to ensure their wellbeing as they transition to adulthood....This report shares learning from the implementation and evaluation of COMPASS across locations in Ethiopia, DRC and Pakistan." 

The Creating Opportunities through Mentoring, Parental Involvement and Safe Spaces (COMPASS) programme, created by partners Columbia University and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), is designed for use in humanitarian settings, including conflict and natural disasters, as well as within the various phases of emergency response. Within that programme, the Girl Shine programme model and resource package was developed to support, protect, and empower adolescent girls in those settings. Over a three year period (2014–2017), the IRC developed and implemented the programme, which was evaluated by Columbia and funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), with refugees living in camps on the Sudan/Ethiopia border, conflict-affected communities in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and displaced populations in north-west Pakistan.

Because humanitarian crises rupture key structures such as health care, education, and social services, and break up or displace families and communities, adolescent girls are at increased risk of gender-based violence (GBV), including sexual violence and exploitation, intimate partner violence, and early and forced marriage.

"COMPASS included the following core interventions: 

• Adolescent girls’ life skills sessions: weekly discussions with groups of adolescent girls in allocated safe spaces, facilitated by young female mentors.
• Parent/caregiver discussion groups: monthly discussions with parents/caregivers of adolescent girls participating in the programme.
• Service provider support: targeted training and ongoing support to develop knowledge, capacity and skills regarding the specific needs of adolescent girls, and particularly those who have experienced GBV."

The external evaluation, across the three programme locations, assessed "the effectiveness, feasibility and acceptability of the above program interventions. The evaluation in each program location had different objectives and different designs." 

Methodologies included quantitative and qualitative data collection, described by country, below:

• "In Ethiopia, an impact evaluation was carried out to study whether the adolescent girls’ life skills sessions conducted as part of COMPASS had an impact on the girls’ exposure to gender- based violence (GBV) and their social and health outcomes.
• In DRC, the evaluation sought to assess the additional impact of the parents’ group discussions on adolescent girls’ exposure to GBV, their social and health outcomes, as well as on the attitudes of parents towards adolescent girls.
• In Pakistan, the evaluation assessed the feasibility and the acceptability of the program to adolescent girls and parents in their context, and measured changes in girls’ social and health outcomes over the course of the programme.

The programme model and resource package responds to these conclusions and recommendations:

1. "Adolescent girls as young as 10 are experiencing GBV in humanitarian settings. Intimate partners were most likely to be the perpetrators of nearly all types of violence against adolescent girls." Hopes and expectations of adolescent girls are low and social support is low, including access to and knowledge of GBV services.
2. Responding to consultation throughout the programme implementation, "[a]dolescent girls expressed a clear demand for the tailored support provided by COMPASS." As a result, girls "had better knowledge of professional GBV services, felt more positive about themselves and about the future, and had stronger social networks and a safe space to go to."
3. Quality GBV services and trained staff were critical.
4. Parent awareness and support increased.
5. Lessons included: offering safe spaces specifically for adolescent girls was vital in all three settings; curricula acknowledged the diversity of the girls and responded to feedback;  and mentors delivered key messages and developed strong relationships with girls. Ongoing training was essential to improve mentors' facilitation styles and increase their comfort addressing sensitive topics, as well as to improve mentors’ understanding of GBV and acceptance of gender equality.

IRC offers recommendations to donors and policy makers, "(including donor governments, UN bodies and humanitarian bodies) and practitioners (including INGOs, national, local and women’s organisations in emergency-affected contexts):

1. Donors and policy makers should commit to the development of a strategy or government-wide policy dedicated to adolescent girls in humanitarian settings.
2. Donors and policy makers should provide long-term, dedicated funding to programmes... that specifically address GBV against adolescent girls in humanitarian settings.
3. Donors and practitioners should ensure adolescent girl programming is driven by adolescent girls’ needs and voices and is responsive to ongoing monitoring.
4. Practitioners should ensure that adolescent girl programming also targets younger adolescent girls.
5. Donors and practitioners should invest in safe spaces for adolescent girls.
6. Donors and practitioners should invest in mentorship approaches.
7. Practitioners should ensure staff implementing adolescent girl programming have GBV knowledge and skills, and receive training on how to work appropriately and effectively with adolescent girls.
8. Donors, policy makers and GBV service providers should ensure adolescent girls can access quality GBV services that are tailored to meet their needs.
9. Donors, policy makers and practitioners should ensure holistic programming exists that tackles wider harmful norms.
10. Donors, practitioners and researchers should pilot further programs and research to better understand how female and male parents/caregivers can contribute to the safety and wellbeing of adolescent girls.
11. Donors and researchers should continue to invest in research to improve program models before moving to large -scale impact evaluations.
12. Donors, practitioners and researchers should prioritise the following areas of research on strategies and interventions that reduce GBV against adolescent girls in conflict and humanitarian settings:

• Another cycle of COMPASS data collection ....
• The effectiveness and impact of mentorship models on the empowerment, community status and gendered attitudes of mentors themselves.
• The ways in which mothers, fathers and caregivers influence girls’ exposure to violence and how this is mediated by gender and power dynamics in the household.
• [Development of] qualitative research methods to better understand the needs of younger adolescent girls in order to inform programming."