Family-strengthening outcomes after five years: a longitudinal study
A longitudinal study of 4,200 households across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana finds that integrated family-strengthening programmes — combining sponsorship, livelihoods support and psychosocial care — reduce household economic vulnerability by 64% over five years.
This paper presents findings from the first five waves of the Agano Family Outcomes Panel (AFOP), a longitudinal cohort study following 4,200 enrolled households across four East and West African countries.
Method
Households entered the cohort at programme intake between 2019 and 2020. Five annual survey waves capture economic, educational, health and psychosocial indicators. A matched comparison cohort of 1,800 non-enrolled households from the same villages provides counterfactual context.
Headline findings
Households enrolled in the full restoration framework reported a 64% reduction in our composite vulnerability index versus a 19% reduction in the comparison cohort. Effects were largest in households where the programme combined sponsorship with the village savings cooperative.
"The interaction effect between sponsorship and savings cooperatives is the most actionable finding of the decade — it implies that the value of either intervention is roughly doubled by the presence of the other."
— Dr. Aminata Diallo, Director of Research
The full dataset, anonymised at the household level, is available on request for academic use under our open-research licence.
Dr. Aminata Diallo
Director of Research, Dakar
