Samata — Girls' Empowerment and Boys' Sports Groups to Keep Marginalised Girls in School and Delay Marriage, Karnataka (Cluster-RCT, Null Primary Outcomes)

Samata targeted Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe girls in north Karnataka (Bagalkote and Bijapur) from the final year of primary school. Components included tutorial classes, career counselling, life-skills and leadership training, 'Parivartan Plus' girls' groups, sports-based groups with boys challenging harmful gender practices, teacher training, school safety plans and outreach to absent pupils.
The trial randomised 80 village clusters (40 intervention, 40 control; NCT01996241) and enrolled 2,457 girls in two cohorts; 1,788 (72.8%) were followed up at endline. Intervention girls were more likely to have had leadership training (40.4% vs 22.2%) and career counselling (48.0% vs 35.9%), and 63.2% vs 11.9% attended Parivartan Plus groups. Fewer agreed a wife should always obey her husband (AOR 0.7).
However, secondary-school retention and child marriage did not differ by trial arm; endline dropout was 25% and marriage 10%, below projections. Sexual teasing reports were higher in the intervention arm (13.4% vs 10.1%), possibly reflecting better reporting. Exposure was shorter than planned (about 18 and 30 months versus 36), the state adopted school-level components during the trial, and outcomes were self-reported.

Read the full analysis: https://www.joghr.org/article/12345-assessing-the-effect-of-the-samata-intervention-on-factors-hypothesised-to-be-on-the-pathway-to-child-marriage-and-school-drop-out-results-from-a-clu