Health Training Programme for Adolescent Girls: Lessons from India’s NGO Initiative

India at present is under going demographic transition in which the adolescents and youths constitute nearly half of the population. Although adolescence is a healthy stage of life, their sexual and reproductive health needs have taken center stage in India’s public health policy debate because of greater vulnerabilities experienced especially by girls. Unlike the developed countries, India has very few targeted programmes for the benefit of the adolescents. The paper examines the impact of the initiative taken by an NGO -SelfEmployed Women’s Association (SEWA)-in Ahmedabad, a city in western India to impart knowledge about sexual and reproductive health and build skills that would be useful to make young girls financially independent and empowered. Quasi-experimental design was used for data collection among beneficiary and non-beneficiary households in two rural blocks and two cities of Gujarat. Non-beneficiary households from the same blocks and urban areas with similar socio-economic characteristics were selected as controls.