Bridging girls back into secondary school: a four-country evaluation
A four-country evaluation of Agano's girls' bridging programme — an intensive six-month curriculum that returns out-of-school adolescent girls to formal secondary education — finds a 91% retention rate at the 24-month mark and a 73% rate at five years.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 33 million girls of secondary-school age are out of school. The reasons compound: early marriage, unpaid care work, distance, cost, pregnancy, the death of a parent, the quiet erosion of a family's belief that a daughter's education is worth the sacrifice.
What the programme does
The bridging curriculum is a six-month, full-time residential intensive that compresses three years of missed secondary content into a single cohort, paired with health education, financial literacy, and a structured re-entry partnership with a local government secondary school.
Outcomes
Across cohorts in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana (n = 2,840 girls, 2018–2024), 91% of graduates were still enrolled in formal secondary school 24 months after re-entry. 73% completed secondary education within five years — versus a regional baseline of 31% for out-of-school adolescent girls.
"The bridging model works because it does not pretend the gap was the girl's fault. It treats the missing years as a structural problem and solves the structural problem."
— Dr. Aminata Diallo, Director of Research
Cost-effectiveness
Total programme cost per graduate (residential, curriculum, re-entry support, two years of follow-on mentoring) is 1,840 USD. Cost per additional year of secondary education completed is 612 USD — competitive with the most cost-effective interventions in the GiveDirectly and J-PAL portfolios.
Dr. Aminata Diallo
Director of Research, Dakar
