Abriendo Oportunidades ('Opening Opportunities') — Mentorship Network for Indigenous Girls in Guatemala

Launched in 2004 by the Population Council in Guatemala, Abriendo Oportunidades recruits and trains young Indigenous women as mentors who run weekly safe-space clubs for Maya girls aged roughly 8-18 in rural communities, covering literacy and numeracy, life skills, sexual and reproductive health, financial literacy and leadership, and prevention of child marriage and gender-based violence.

A 2009-2011 household-level evaluation across 36 programme communities found 100% of girl leaders had completed sixth grade versus 81.5% of girls nationally, 72% of participants remained in school at cycle end versus 29% of Indigenous girls aged 16-17 nationwide, 97% remained unmarried during the cycle, and 88% reported having a bank account. A 2017 external cluster-randomised evaluation found participating girls had significantly lower reported exposure to physical violence and were less likely to be married than comparison-group peers.

Two decades on, the programme has reached more than 25,000 girls and trained roughly 500 mentors across over 500 rural communities, with its model adapted in Belize and Mexico; as with most long-running NGO-led programmes operating alongside other services, isolating its independent causal contribution is harder in the larger-scale recent data than in the smaller, controlled 2017 evaluation.