Amani Girls Organisation (AGO)
Location
Tanzania
Sector
Gender
Type of Investment
Grant
Project Stage
Pilot
Length of Investment
2023 - 2025
Website
Investment Overview
The Learning Initiative on Norms, Exploitation and Abuse (LINEA) works to prevent age-disparate transactional sex (ADTS) at the individual and community social norms levels through a flagship radio drama and concurrent educational curricula for both girls and older men. GIF’s pilot grant to AGO is to support scale readiness for LINEA.
The Development Challenge
ADTS is defined as sex exchanged for material support between girls under the age of 18 and men that are more than 10 years older. So, while ADTS exists on a spectrum of coercion, it is always considered sexual violence. With that, it also has far ranging negative impacts on a girl’s health, education, and life outcomes such as higher risk of HIV infection or school drop out due to early pregnancy. Despite this, few interventions have addressed ADTS as a primary outcome. While a wide range of motivations drive ADTS, underlying social norms play a key role in sustaining the practice.
The Innovation
LINEA uses an innovative gender and social norms lens to tackle ADTS through a radio drama, “Mschiana wa Kati”, or “Girl in the Middle”, and concurrent educational curricula sessions with both girls and men. The radio drama, with locally relevant characters and storylines, serves to engage whole communities in critical reflection on drivers and prevention of ADTS. The curricula draw on and reinforce this messaging by targeting attitude and behaviour change with at risk girls and, separately, high risk men. LINEA has been co-developed by AGO, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the National Institute of Medical Research(NIMR) in Tanzania. Informed by formative research and rigorous feasibility testing including a quasi-experimental evaluation of the radio drama, LINEA holds promise to reduce ADTS as a stand alone or add on innovation to existing programming.
Our Investment
GIF provided a pilot grant of $230,000 in 2023 to support AGO’s long run vision to scale LINEA nationally in Tanzania. Our grant sits alongside ongoing implementation of LINEA under a randomised controlled trial (RCT) with the LSHTM and NIMR and intends to de-risk and prepare for future scale up of the intervention. Working towards this vision with our grant, AGO is preparing a scale readiness plan and building up capacity to support such a scale up of LINEA with fidelity, once results from the RCT are available.
Amani Girls in Numbers
Girls are more likely to contract HIV than their male peers in Southern and Eastern Africa
The percentage of teenagers who have had a child or are pregnant in Tanzania Mainland