Of the 300 million people who live in absolute poverty in India, approximately 100 million are girls between the ages of 10 and 19.  They face particular risk. More than one-half are married by the time they reach 18—the legal marriage age.  Marriage at a young age is associated with a variety of adverse health outcomes, including increased risk of malnutrition, anemia, maternal and infant mortality, and high fertility.  In addition, young age at marriage is strongly associated with limited educational and economic opportunities, perpetuating gender inequities.  While there are an estimated 3 million women’s self-help groups that could assist adolescent girls to resist young marriage and attain greater resources and influence in their communities, there are few services designed to meet their specific needs.

To help self-help groups better serve and support adolescent girls, this initiative

• supports the development of Learning Conversations—a simple, powerful and proven innovation in dialogue-based education for self-help groups—to address issues relevant to adolescent girls and women in India;

• builds self-help group promoting institutions’ (SHPI) capacity to disseminate Learning Conversations on a mass scale to self-help groups; and

• builds SHPI capacity to better realize the potential of existing self-help groups to address the needs of adolescent girls.  

Expanding self-help group services to more deliberately integrate adolescent girls and address their issues is compelling for a host of reasons.  First, self-help groups represent an important forum for social support to adolescents who often lack such space at home or elsewhere in their communities.  Second, they offer economic opportunities for adolescent girls to begin saving and managing money.  Saving and borrowing, in turn, can help girls prepare for and cope with economic and health shocks, seize economic opportunities and manage life-cycle events.  Third, the opportunity to share and enhance knowledge and skills through Learning Conversations fosters positive changes in behavior.  Fourth, self-help groups provide girls with leadership opportunities to enhance their influence in their families and communities.

Over the next three years, the focus on girls will extend to some of the poorest rural communities of the poorest states in India—Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.