AGAS
Adolescent Girls Agency Survey
A considerable portion of our efforts from inception centered on the creation of the Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS) and the strengthening and validation of the survey in the contexts where our partners work.
Adolescent Girls Agency
In 2018, community leaders from across East Africa identified a single, ultimate goal for their holistic and locally-rooted efforts to improve girls’ lives.
That goal? Agency for every girl.
Agency is defined as a girl's ability to effect change in her own life and that of her community.
This collective agreement launched a multi-month process to identify shared outcomes that, when measured and shared, could demonstrate the collective impact of AMPLIFY Girls partner organizations.
Through the use of research and analytical tools designed for collective input and concept mapping, a top priority emerged for the collective: girls’ agency. Despite coming from a wide range of sectors (health, education, economic empowerment, and more), the research indicated clearly that CDOs would consider themselves successful if the girls they served showed, more than anything else, notable increases in agency over time.
Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS)
The Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS) is a psychometric survey tool designed to capture the multidimensional construct of girls’ agency (or agentic capacity) and to assign a numeric score to this capacity in adolescent girls. AGAS was developed by Dr. Aubryn Sidle and Dr. Brenda Oulo of GAL Consulting in collaboration with AMPLIFY Girls and our network of partners.
The Adolescent Girls Agency Survey, developed and validated from 2018-2024, characterizes agency as both a girls’ personal belief in their ability combined with the skills needed to effect change in their own lives and world. The localized tool is currently in use by our partner organizations across a multitude of settings to measure the outcomes of their life skills programs.
Adolescent Girls Agency Portal
In 2024-2026, we pivot our focus to the widespread dissemination of the survey and seek to position AMPLIFY Girls as an evidence broker between the CDOs using the survey and global actors seeking high-impact programming for adolescent girls.
Our dissemination tactics will center on the launch of the Adolescent Girls Agency Portal, which allows us to grant access to the Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS) to our network and organizations far beyond it. The portal will feature automated analysis and a suite of training options that guide organizations on leveraging their results using the agency survey, either for evaluation, fundraising, or advocacy purposes.
We also aim to use the portal as a hub of information regarding promising practices in building adolescent girls’ agency and to promote key learnings derived from that hub.
AMPLIFY Girls and GAL Consulting
AMPLIFY Girls has been in partnership with Dr. Aubryn Allyn Sidle and Dr. Brenda Oulo since the founding of our network. Beginning in 2018, Drs. Sidle and Oulo worked with AMPLIFY Girls partner organizations to co-create a framework for adolescent girls’ agency, which later served as the basis for the groundbreaking Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS). Since the start of this collaborative relationship, Drs. Sidle and Oulo have generated a number of publications and reports on their work with AMPLIFY Girls, including, most recently “Assessment of a Practitioner-Derived Framework for Measuring Girl’s Agency in East Africa” published in Comparative Education Review (2023).
In 2023, Drs. Sidle and Oulo founded Girls Agency Lab (GAL) Consulting, LLC. - a research consulting firm dedicated to the practice and measure of girls' agency. Today, AMPLIFY Girls and GAL Consulting collaborate on agency-focused research projects, pursuing deeper insights and understanding with regard to what most affects adolescent girls’ agency in local contexts and beyond. They continue to co-own and operate the Adolescent Girls Agency Survey (AGAS) and the Adolescent Girls Agency Portal - the open-source online tool that allows users from around the world to access automated analysis of their girls’ agency-focused programming.
