In 2009, the idea was straightforward: create a platform inside schools — called a Meena Manch, after the UNICEF character Meena — where girls could meet regularly, with adult facilitation, to talk about the things that affected their lives. Education. Health. The marriages their families were planning for them.
The theory was that a group of girls speaking together would be heard differently than one girl speaking alone. The family that could dismiss a daughter’s objection might hesitate when twenty girls from the school showed up at the door.
It worked. But the mechanism was stranger and more interesting than the theory predicted.
The collective voice
The Meena Manch collectives were established across multiple Indian states, reaching thousands of schools. In some districts, the collectives measurably delayed the age of marriage for girls in the surrounding community — not just for Manch members, but for other girls in the area.
The mechanism: the collective created a social cost for early marriage. A family considering marrying their daughter early knew that the Manch girls would talk about it — to teachers, to the panchayat, to other families. The privacy that child marriage depends on was punctured by the collective’s existence.
What the data missed
The standard programme evaluation measured what you would expect: school attendance, marriage age, Manch meeting frequency. These are the indicators that funders ask for and that logframes are built around.
But the more interesting change was harder to measure. Girls who had been in a Manch for a year carried themselves differently. They spoke up in class. They negotiated with their parents about when to come home. They asked questions of visiting health workers that the health workers had never been asked before.
This is agency. It does not sit neatly in an indicator. It is not a number. But it is the thing that the Manch actually produced, and it is what made the marriage delay possible. The delay was a downstream effect of the agency; the agency was the real outcome.
The measurement problem
We did not have a good instrument for measuring agency in 2009, and we barely have one now. The Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM) captures some of it. Self-efficacy scales capture some more. But the full picture — the moment a fourteen-year-old girl stands up at a village meeting and says, publicly, that her classmate should not be married yet — does not reduce to a Likert scale.
This is the gap between what programmes produce and what evaluations can see. The Meena Manch produced agency. The evaluation could see attendance and marriage age. The space between those two things is where most of the interesting work in development measurement still needs to happen.
What I took from this
Three things, which have stayed with me across every programme I have worked on since:
First, the unit of change was the collective, not the individual. One girl speaking alone was dismissed. Twenty girls speaking together changed the community’s calculation. Programme design that targets individuals misses this.
Second, the most important outcome was the hardest to measure. Agency showed up in body language, in confidence, in the quality of questions girls asked. It did not show up in the logframe.
Third, the programme worked because it was embedded in an existing institution — the school. The Manch was not a parallel structure. It met inside the school, during school hours, with a teacher present. This is what made it sustainable and what made the community take it seriously.
The question I keep coming back to: how do we build measurement systems that can see these things without flattening them into numbers that miss the point?