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Good practice Imported

SWEDD: Sahel Women's Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Project — Chad

Chad · N'Djamena · See the Chad profile · See the N'Djamena profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 67% 52/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Since 2015 the World Bank/UN-backed SWEDD project has funded girls' education, health and empowerment in Chad, part of a $680M multi-country investment. A 2024 expansion reached 127,000 girls with academic/financial support; primary attendance rose to 83%.

680 USD million
World Bank cumulative SWEDD financing (2015-2024)
376 USD million
2020 SWEDD financing round (partly earmarked for Chad scale-up) (2020)
127,000 girls
Girls reached by the 2024 expansion (academic/financial support) (2024)
83 %
Girls' primary-school attendance rate (2024)
77.9 %
Women aged 20-24 married before age 18 (2014/15)
SWEDD: Sahel Women's Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Project — Chad

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
World Bank Group / UNFPA (SWEDD Project)
Period
2015–2024
Keywords
girls' education, child marriage prevention, reproductive health, economic empowerment

Context

Chad is a founding country of the Sahel Women's Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) project, launched in November 2015 by the World Bank Group and UN agencies (including UNFPA) at the request of Sahel heads of state. SWEDD runs alongside Chad's 2016 law raising the legal minimum marriage age to 18, with penalties of up to ten years' imprisonment for violators.

Objectives

Fund girls'-education retention, reproductive-health access and economic-empowerment activities aimed at reducing child marriage and early school leaving.

Activities

The World Bank has committed a cumulative $680 million to SWEDD across its phases, including a $376 million financing round approved in 2020 partly earmarked to scale up activities in Chad; a 2024 expansion provided academic and financial assistance to roughly 127,000 girls in Chad.

Results

Girls' primary-school attendance rose to 83%, coinciding with the 2024 expansion. Against this, a 2014/15 Demographic and Health Survey found 77.9% of women aged 20-24 had married before 18, among the highest rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, showing the scale of the challenge the programme is still working against.

Conclusions

A decade-long, well-funded programme with real reported gains, but these rely on programme monitoring data rather than an independent impact evaluation, so should be read as promising but not yet rigorously proven.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M) — $680 million cumulative World Bank financing across the multi-country SWEDD project (2015-2024), including a $376 million 2020 round partly earmarked for Chad's scale-up; a Chad-specific cost breakdown is not published.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Running continuously since November 2015 across sequential financing phases through at least 2024 -- a near-decade-long, still-active programme.
Staffing & skills
World Bank Group and UN agencies (including UNFPA), programme management, Chadian national ministries (health, education), Community and school-based delivery staff

Conditions for success

  • Sustained multi-year multilateral financing
  • Complementary legal reform (the 2016 marriage-age law)
  • Continued political buy-in from Sahel governments

Common failure modes

  • Child-marriage prevalence remains extremely high (77.9% baseline) despite nearly a decade of investment, showing structural barriers funding alone has not overcome
  • No independent evaluation exists to confirm the programme's causal impact

Where it fits

Governance type
multilateral (World Bank/UN)-financed national programme
Scale
national programme within a multi-country regional initiative
Income level
low-income

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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