This research was written by Pari Chowdhary, Feven Tassaw Mekuria, Dagmawit Tewahido, Hanna Gulema, Ryan Derni, and Jefrey Edmeades.

In Ethiopia's Amara region, girls encounter child marriage at a high rate. They are also less able to negotiate sex or use family planning. With the purpose of improving their lives, CARE's TESFA program delivered reproductive health and financial savings curriculum to married girls through peer-based solidarity groups to 5,000 adolescent girls. This was divided into 3 interventions: sexual and reproductive health, economic empowerment, and a combination of both. Participants reported improvement in both areas. Four years after TESFA, 88% of groups communicated meeting without continued CARE's assistance, and some of the girl participants created new groups following the TESFA model. Also, some girls that did not participate in TESFA, replicated the model to create their own groups. Despite this, there is still in question who contributed to this sustainment and scale-up of groups.

Original article: https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-021-01304-7
Originally published by Biomedcentral and is republished under the creative commons 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).