Ten years ago, Smart Start began with an idea that failed, and with a team willing to admit it. What grew from that failure is a program that has since helped adolescent girls and young couples across Ethiopia decide, on their own terms, when to marry, when to have children, and how to build a life first.
What follows is not a summary of that decade. It is the decade itself, in the words of the people who built it and the people it was built for: a program director, field advisers, health workers, community mobilizers, a local chairperson, and the young women whose lives changed because someone finally asked what they wanted and then listened.
