BALIKA (Bangladeshi Association for Life Skills, Income, and Knowledge for Adolescents)

In 2012 the Population Council and partners embarked on BALIKA program, a four-year study to identify effectiveness of skills-building approaches to empower girls and delaying their marriages in communities with highest rate of child marriages. The BALIKA program is designed to generate knowledge about factors underlying early and child marriage, through an integrated intervention and research study to build the evidence base for alternative strategies for effective, replicable programs to delay marriage by offering three distinct interventions and assessing their impact relative to each other and relative to a control population. While basic lifeskills training by locally recruited mentors in safe spaces for girls and community mobilization are common to all intervention villages, they differ in terms of additional emphasis on three intervention strategies: rights-based life skills, livelihoods support, and education support. The study is a randomized controlled trial involving more than 9,000 girls aged 12–18 in 72 intervention communities and 24 control communities in three districts in southern Bangladesh: Khulna, Satkhira, and Narail. This is the first rigorously evaluated study to provide evidence on approaches to delay child marriage in Bangladesh.