Article HistorySchool enrolment and attendance for adolescent girls is a key priority for education sector in most developing countries. In Somalia, this is even more prominent given the low enrolment rate of girls and the gender specific challenges that the girls face. Girls in Somalia often remain absent from schools during their menstrual periods due to lack of hygiene facilities and the social stigma in using the facility where they exist. Girl Friendly Space (GFS) has been adopted as a means to mitigate these challenges. Despite strong narratives of the effectiveness of the GFS, there is lack of evidence on the impact of GFS on reducing school absenteeism. By using secondary data, this study explores the potential effects of GFS on reducing school absenteeism. The study indicate that having GFS in schools can reduce the likelihood of adolescent girls being absent from school in the past month by about 15 percentage points. Absenteeism due to "sickness" is about 17 percentage points lower in schools with GFS compared to schools without the facility. Although this study cannot fully address the selection bias to claim these as impact estimates, the differences for boys between the two types of schools in absenteeism is much lower indicating possible effects of GFS on girls" school attendance.Contribution/Originality: This study is one of very few studies that have sought to demonstrate potential effects of girl friendly spaces in reducing adolescent girls" school absenteeism in culturally sensitive regions like Somalia. Primarily the study shows equipping and enhancing privacy in girls-only toilets can potentially reduce absenteeism up to 15 percentage points.
Humanitarian programming in fragile economies often use unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) to offset food insecurity. However, there is an increasing focus on using cash transfers to boost household incomes beyond the short-term through micro-enterprise start-up and growth. This paper conducts a randomised control trial to measure the impact of three different sizes of business grants against UCT in Somalia. We find that giving the same amount of money as a lump sum business grant results in higher likelihood of business ownership and income compared with UCT in the short run (3–4 months after the transfers). However, the impacts are larger and persist 3 years later only for those who received larger amount of grants. The results indicate our ‘medium’-sized grant being more cost-effective.
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