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illustrations of the many considerations a girl and her partner may have — including health and financial resources

Smart Start Essentials

Amharic, English
Download Job Aid
Amharic, English
Download Training Guide
Amharic, English
Download Goal Card

“Through our program, girls, alongside their husbands, can map out the cost of a baby in culturally relevant terms (like, a bag of grains) to explore how spacing out child birth can help couples plan for the lives they want to live. It’s a process that is achieving rapid results: since our August 2017 pilot, approximately one in two girls who interact with Smart Start adopts a contraceptive method.” —Metsehate Ayenekulu, Adolescents 360 Ethiopia Program Director

What is it?

A handpicked package of tools to prime you with the skills and know-how to roll out and deliver A360’s Smart Start in your communities and beyond. Essentials include:

A training, discussion script, and goal card for health extension workers, developed in partnership with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health, that includes messaging in both Amharic and English.

How did we use it?

A360’s Smart Start uses these tools—and financial planning—as an entry point to engage young married couples in planning their futures, positioning contraception as a tool to achieve their goals. Through Smart Smart, married adolescent girls aged 15-19 alongside their husbands map out how much a child would cost in contextually relevant terms, like sacks of grain. It’s leading to rapid change.

Consider using it to:

Flip through the key components of the Smart Start design, and see how we introduced the project to key in-country partners. Consider how you might use these tools for your own adapted version of this intervention.

(Note: the Smart Start intervention evolves, so while these are useful resources to get a sense of the intervention, if you are interested in full replication please email us for the latest, at [email protected])