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Growing Up GREAT! is a seven-year project to implement, scale, and generate evidence on the Growing Up GREAT! (GUG) intervention and healthy transitions from early adolescence to young adulthood. Funded jointly by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2016-2023, the project has three broad aims:
1. Program Implementation: Adapt GUG to the urban Kinshasa context and implement using adaptive management approaches with an eye towards long-term program sustainability and institutionalization into national systems.
2. Scale-Up: Collaborate with the Congolese Ministries of Education, Health and Social Affairs, community-based organizations, and youth partners across the project lifecycle to institutionalize a contextually specific, scalable gender-transformative sexuality program.
3. Evidence Generation: Assess longitudinal GUG impact and contribute to the global evidence-base on how gender attitudes, behaviors, and norms are formed and transformed among very young adolescents.
GUG is a nine-month multi-level sexuality and puberty education program for boys and girls ages 10 to 14 years—ages that represent a critical developmental period in which children’s gendered expectations, attitudes, and behaviors are modifiable but begin to solidify.
Informed by the social-ecological model, GUG addresses spheres of influence—individual, family, school, community—that most affect early adolescent life experiences. In working not only with adolescents but also their parents/caregivers, teachers, and health providers, GUG aims to foster a supportive environment for adolescents to understand and examine sexual and reproductive health topics and related social and gender norms.
The program uses a toolkit of age-tailored gender-transformative materials to: 1) build very young adolescents’ (VYA) gender-equitable attitudes and behaviors, their self-efficacy, and puberty and reproductive health knowledge; and 2) engage the adults with whom VYAs interact in home, school, and healthcare environments through facilitated discussions and community reflection sessions.
Learn more about GUG and the evidence-based models on which the intervention is based.
The seven-year project life cycle maximized learning opportunities across the three project aims: program implementation, scale-up efforts, and evidence generation. Explore our legacy contributions and insights from the key phases of the project and scale-up journey:
A cross-disciplinary consortium of technical experts led the GUG implementation, research, and scale-up activities in partnership with a local stakeholder advisory board.
