Girls’ Holistic Development Program Qualitative Research Report

As part of the USAID-funded Passages Project, the Institute for Reproductive Health provided technical assistance through a realist evaluation approach to guide understanding and scale-up of the Girls’ Holistic Development Program, implemented through the American and Senegalese non-government organization Grandmothers Project – Change through Culture. The Girls’ Holistic Development program promotes change in culturally embedded social norms and practices related to girls’ education, early marriage and pregnancy, and female genital mutilation/cutting by both empowering girls and creating an enabling environment where family and community actors support change for girls. The Passages-Grandmothers Project collaboration began in 2017, when the program was beginning an expansion into seven villages. This presented an opportunity to assess the Girls’ Holistic Development Program’s impact using a mixed method, quasi-experimental design to explore how norms change processes work, including an endline qualitative study in four of the intervention villages. This study sought to understand the contextual characteristics and mechanisms of change that influence whether and how GHD achieves its objectives, and how they vary within and between villages. The report, which is available in both French and English, with an English executive summary, focuses on the findings of this qualitative inquiry.