Global Youth Economic Opportunities Conference
Providing Social Support Savings & Microcredit Opportunities to Adolescent girls at Risk for HIV/AIDS in Kenya
This microfinance brief looks at the approach adopted by the K-Rep and the Population Council that addressed the livelihood-strategy constraints faced by adolescent girls at risk for HIV/AIDS in an urban slum in Kenya. The objective of the Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY) program was to reduce adolescent girls’ vulnerabilities to adverse social and reproductive health outcomes by improving their livelihoods options.
Author
Microfinance Brief, Tap and Reposition Youth ProgramAbstract
In 1998, two organizations with considerable expertise in their fields came together to develop a microfinance approach that would address livelihood-strategy constraints for adolescent girls at risk for HIV/AIDS in an urban slum in Kenya. The first, the Population Council, is an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization (NGO) that seeks to improve the well-being and reproductive health of current and future generations around the world and to help achieve a humane, equitable, and sustainable balance between people and resources. The second organization, K-Rep, is a well-known Kenyan microfinance institution (MFI).
The initiative was named the Tap and Reposition Youth (TRY) program. The objective of the program was to reduce adolescent girls’ vulnerabilities to adverse social and reproductive health outcomes by improving their livelihoods options. Adolescent girls are a particularly challenging population, usually ignored by development agencies. The adolescents in this project were out-of-school girls and young women aged 16–22 residing in low-income and slum areas of Nairobi. TRY used a group-based microfinance model to provide credit, savings, business support, and mentoring to program participants. The project has gone through three phases since its inception in 1999.
