Passages Project

Enabling young women and men to live gender-equitable lives free of violence, coerced sex, and unintended pregnancy is a critical global challenge.

Social norms shape behaviors related to sexual debut, intimate partner and sexual violence, and early marriage and affect young people’s access to the education, services, and information they need to protect their health. Research shows that investing in social norms change at the community and individual levels while ensuring supportive policies and access to high-quality services can bring about significant improvements in reproductive health and well-being.

The Passages Project is a USAID-funded, seven-year implementation research project that aims to address a broad range of social norms, at scale, to achieve sustained improvements in voluntary family planning, reproductive health, and gender-based violence. Passages seeks to build the evidence base and contribute to the capacity of the global community to strengthen normative environments that support reproductive health and well-being, especially among young people at life-course transition points, including very young adolescents, newly married youth, and first-time parents. Passages leverages these formative transition points to test, study, and scale up a suite of interventions in Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Nepal, Niger, and Senegal and to provide technical assistance in more countries to promote collective change and foster an enabling environment for family planning and healthy timing and spacing of pregnancies.

Learn more about the Passages Project, including our legacy, impact areas, and community interventions, below.