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Abstract
Debates in girls' education policy and practice point to life skills programs as a promising intervention for improving the outcomes of marginalized girls. Yet the difficulties of defining and measuring life skills and the complexities for practice of understanding how to instill the soft capacities like self-efficacy which are often the focus of life skills programs, have contributed to serious knowledge gaps. This article synthesizes theories from education, developmental psychology, and gender and development to offer Agency as a locally adaptable framework for measuring of life skills programs. Based on empirical examples and curriculum from five life skills programs, I argue that agentic capacity is critically linked to identity formation processes in adolescence and that alternative pedagogical practice and skills-based learning are important facilitators of Agency formation. I offer a draft theoretical framework for how agentic capacity can be cultivated by girls' education programs.
INTRODUCTION
Evidence from around the world shows that increasing girls' schooling dramatically reduces child marriage (Wodon et al. 2017), increases national GDP (Klasen 2002), lowers maternal death by more than 66% (Bhalotra et al. 2013; Gupta et al. 2002), and reduces child mortality by up to 49% (UNICEF 2010). Recently, however, questions about gross inequities in school quality have challenged the traditional assumptions about the implicit value of education, especially for girls (Learning Metrics Task Force 2013). Differential experiences of education for boys and girls (Mensch et al. 2003) combined with real concerns about school safety for girls (Psaki et al. 2017), have led to a growing acknowledgment that education that does not actively address existing social inequities can be disempowering (Adely 2012; Dehyle 2009). Yet the promise of an" empowering" education, continues to have powerful implications for gender equity, social mobility, and the positive transformation of society (Sperling and Winthrop 2016). Because of the link between sexual and reproductive health, schooling, and child marriage, the gains are largest for girls during the child-bearing years, thus amplifying the benefits of girls' education during adolescence and at the post-primary level (Sperling and Winthrop 2016; Wodon et al. 2017).
In this paper, I take the notion of an empowering education as the goal of education efforts globally and seek to understand and untangle the circumstances of practice which might contribute to...