Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents Impact Evaluation Survey 2013-2016 Baseline and Endline, Survey of Community Leaders and ELA Mentors Sierra Leone

This study includes baseline and endline survey data collected for a randomized control trial testing impacts of club-based program designed to lift barriers to socio-economic empowerment faced by young women in rural Sierra Leone. The program offers a safe space, the ELA club, set up within each village and accessible only to club memebers - young women aged 12 to 25. In addition, clubs offered a bundle of additional programs: Life Skills training, vocational training and microfinance.

The impact evaluation coincided with the lockdowns that took place during Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

The datasets are used to generate the publication 'Safe Spaces for Teenage Girls in a Time of Crisis' that is published at the Journal of the European Economic Association. The replication package published by the journal contains the Stata code necessary to clean the raw data and reproduce the paper's exhibits.

Third party data was also used in the analysis. While not distributed here with the survey data, this secondary data and details on how to access it are provided in the paper's replication package.

The project includes: (i) census of 200 rural villages (2013) ; (ii) baseline survey of women aged 12-25 years old, collected week before the first Ebola case in Sierra Leone (2014); (iii) phone survey of community leaders to monitor disruptions during Ebola crisis (2015); (iv) phone survey of ELA mentors to monitor club functioning (2015); (v) endline survey, after the country was declared Ebola-free (2016).

The Sierra Leone Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents Impact Evaluation Survey covered the following topics:

ELA - Village Household Census

• Demographics
• Household roster
• Village summary sheet

Baseline

• Identification
• Education
• Income generating activities
• Skill status
• Financial literacy and analytical ability
• Loans and savings
• Economic decision-making
• Aspirations and expectations
• Marriage and family
• Confidence, attitudes, mobility, and satisfaction
• Time use
• likelihood of participating in the program
• Exposure to violence
• Risky behaviors
• Sexual behaviors
• Household information
• Daily functioning
• Data accuracy