Growing Up GREAT! Implementation Guide
Growing Up GREAT! is a scalable, multi-level intervention designed to improve reproductive health and gender equity among very young adolescents and the important adults in their lives. It supports very young adolescents and their communities to question and break down the social barriers that prevent access to health information and care. It was piloted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2017-2018 under the Passages Project, which aims to address a broad range of social norms, at scale, to achieve sustained improvements in family planning and reproductive health. Growing Up GREAT! was evaluated by the Global Early Adolescent Study and shown to be effective at shifting several key reproductive health attitudes and norms.
The Growing Up GREAT! Implementation Guide is a step-by step resource for organizations who wish to adopt the intervention. It provides users with guidance, tested tools, and materials for planning, implementing, supervising, and monitoring this successful norms-shifting intervention.
Other supporting materials for parents, teachers, and health providers are included throughout the guide.
Growing Up GREAT! Briefs
This brief informs program implementers and provides an overview of the Growing Up GREAT! program. Growing Up GREAT! adapts elements of two tested models—Gender Roles, Equality, and Transformations (GREAT) from northern Uganda and GrowUp Smart from Rwanda—for an urban Democratic Republic of the Congo setting. Growing up GREAT! applies an ecological perspective addressing spheres of influence—individual, family, school, community—that most affect early adolescent life experiences.
Download the Growing Up GREAT! Brief here in French and English!
Based on baseline findings from the Global Early Adolescent Study (GEAS), this brief provides comparative profiles of in-school and out-of-school girls and boys age 10-14, highlighting similarities and differences not only in the young people themselves but also in the environments in which they live.
Download the Profiles of Younger Adolescents in Urban Kinshasa Brief here in French and English!
Annex A: Growing Up GREAT! Adaptation Guide
Annex A, the Growing Up GREAT! Adaptation Guide, provides detailed guidance on adapting the Growing Up GREAT! intervention and materials to different contexts. This guide, provides step-by-step guidance for adapting the Growing Up GREAT! intervention and materials to different contexts. It also offers advice on how to build stakeholder and community support for the intervention throughout the material design and testing phases, and helps programmers consider how to integrate the intervention approach into local health, education and social infrastructure.
Download the Growing Up GREAT! Adaptation Guide here!
Annex B: VYA Toolkit
Annex B, the VYA Toolkit, is a package of interactive, age-appropriate materials used during activities with VYAs. The Growing Up Great! VYA Toolkit is an age-appropriate, gender transformative intervention package that provides both in-school and out-of-school very young adolescent (VYA) girls and boys aged 10-14 years with accurate information about sexual and reproductive health (SRH), and fosters discussion about related social norms. The VYA Toolkit was adapted from materials used in the Gender Roles, Equality and Transformation (GREAT) Project and incorporates elements of other evidence-based programs for this age group, including Choices, Voices, Promises and GrowUp Smart, a puberty education curriculum for VYAs. Additional support materials for parents, teachers and health providers are included throughout the Growing up Great Implementation Guide.
Download the VYA tools (French):
- Growing Up GREAT! Puberty Books
- Growing up GREAT! Flipbooks
- Growing up GREAT! Activity Cards
- Growing up GREAT! Gameboard & Question Cards