Accelerating Well-being for Adolescents Through Transformative Public Policy: A Framework for Action

Abstract

Purpose: As governments around the world are shaping policy responses to advance adolescent well-being and protect their rights, the tools and resources to strengthen policy foundations, and ultimately improve their effectiveness, remain limited. This paper proposes a framework to support policy action with an explicit adolescent focus and applies it to two illustrative case studies to unpack the underlying policy conditions for success.

Methods: We develop an analytic framework with an adolescent lens that focuses on the full policy life-course, from development, to implementation, to evaluation. We then choose two illustrative case studies to apply this framework - 1) abolition of secondary school fees policy in Kenya and 2) age of marriage law in Mexico. These cases were chosen based on the existence of rigorous causal evidence of effect, alignment of salience with expert opinions, broad-based implications for adolescents across contexts, and varied levels of success at achieving intended outcomes.

Results: Our framework identified six key components as critical foundations for adolescent-focused policies: (1) policy features and costs, (2) implementation considerations, (3) participatory approach, (4) inclusion and coverage, (5) policy appropriateness, and (6) monitoring and evaluation, each with key adolescent-specific elements. We find that the majority of the essential policy elements are addressed in the school fees abolition policy (Kenya), but are sparser in the age of marriage law (Mexico). The results also highlight the lack of decentralized monitoring as well as meaningful adolescent engagement at any level of policy development as potential drivers of ineffectiveness of adolescent-centric policies.

Discussion: Our adolescent policy analysis framework can serve as an important tool to define principles in the development of effective adolescent policies. It also can serve as a useful evaluation tool to unpack the 'black box' of policy effectiveness when combined with robustly estimated effects.

Keywords: Adolescents; Causality; Comparative case study; Law; Policy; Regulation.

Figure 1

A proposed policy analysis framework for adolescents (This graphic draws from the policy analysis frameworks of Shiffman [20,21], Center for Global Development [22], WHO and ExpandNet [23], Hadley et al. [24], and Jacobs and George [25]).