Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY): Providing social support, savings, and microcredit opportunities for young women in areas with high HIV prevalence

Expanding safe spaces, financial education, and savings for adolescent girls in Kenya

“…These programs demonstrated that there is a demand for savings programs tailored to adolescent girls living in precarious urban environments like Kibera. This new frontier of programming is based on a decade of lessons from the Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY) experiment (Erulkar et al 2006;Erulkar and Chong 2005), K-Rep Development Agency's informal savings groups, and Binti Pamoja's experience with the financial literacy training leading to high levels of informal savings. These programs found that girls are interested in savings independent of both credit and group responsibility-i.e., girls need access to their own savings and cannot afford to wait for their turn in a group rotation model.…”

Enhancing the benefits of girls' livelihood initiatives

“…In all Council projects mentors provided skills training and led group activities and discussions. A savings and microcredit project in Nairobi, Kenya discovered through monitoring and evaluation that its social support component had to be augmented in order to meet the needs of girls and young women living in low-income and slum areas (Erulkar et al 2006). Beginning in 1998, the Population Council collaborated with Kenya Development Agency (KDA), the oldest and largest microfinance institution in Kenya, to implement the Tap and Reposition Youth project (TRY).…”

Girls left behind: Redirecting HIV interventions toward the most vulnerable

“…Experience shows that even in disadvantaged communities, female mentors, typically aged 17-30, can be recruited for a small stipend. These young women speak the local languages, are rooted in and know the codes of the community, and can provide valuable mentoring to girls in need (Binti Pamoja Center 2006;Erulkar et al 2006).…”

“…Program venues created for girls and young women could be the basis for savings clubs where they could gain financial literacy, access to savings, and dignified work. Livelihoods programs must be adapted to meet their needs; microfinance experiments that pay insufficient attention to girls' social needs and that require loan-taking without an initial focus on financial literacy and savings increase girls' vulnerability (Population Council 2005;Erulkar et al 2006).…”