Amenah I Graduation Ceremony
Amenah is an intervention study that aims to mitigate the drivers of early marriage among Syrian refugee adolescent girls in Lebanon. It is conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers in the Faculty of Health Sciences, American University of Beirut. Based on a gender empowerment approach, Amenah’s main objective is to delay marriage among girls until they reach 18 years of age through increasing their school attachment and improving their access to sexual and reproductive health knowledge and services.
The Amenah intervention commenced following a survey conducted on school attendance and marriage among Syrian refugee girls and young women who reside in three towns in the Bekaa region of Lebanon. The survey results showed that half of 9-17-year-old Syrian refugee girls were not enrolled in school and 24% of those younger than 18 years of age were married. Following the survey, the Amenah intervention was designed to be implemented in two phases.
Amenah I (Pilot)
Amenah I commenced in 2018 as a community-based multi-component pilot intervention implemented with 11-14-year-old Syrian girls enrolled in school in a town in West Bekaa. It combined an ecological approach, focusing on the family and school as two settings that influence adolescent development, with an innovative approach to gender empowerment that is sensitive to the context of protracted displacement. The pilot consisted of 16 modules on assertive communication and decision making; health and hygiene during puberty; gender equity and rights; and relationships and marriage (including the negative effects of early marriage). Each module included a number of interactive sessions designed following careful review of existing early marriage intervention programs in low resource settings. The sessions were delivered by trained community workers from the Syrian community. Amenah I also included English language support sessions for the girls, which were requested by parents, and discussion sessions with the mothers of adolescent girls.
Amenah II
Based on the lessons learned from the Pilot, Amenah II was designed as a nine-month quasi-experimental intervention study that will include in-school and out-of-school Syrian refugee girls aged 11-17 who reside in the Amenah I town. A comparison group will include adolescent girls with the same characteristics in a neighboring town in Bekaa. Amenah II builds on Amenah I but explicitly incorporates content to enhance girls’ access to sexual and reproductive health information and services. It will also include intervention components with the girls’ mothers, aiming at improving mother daughter communication, especially about sexual and reproductive health matters.
➜ Click here to download Amenah’s brochure
➜ Click here to download Amenah’s brochure
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