Co-Producing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Indicators-repurposing the Consensual (Poverty) Approach for Out-of-School Girls

Despite advancements in the measurement of poverty, efforts to assess its drivers and effects often fail to incorporate context-specific needs. Adolescents in poor communities face significantly higher barriers in accessing sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR), yet one of the main challenges in assessing improvements in SRHR remains in creating questionnaires that capture local norms and access to rights in ways relevant to out-of-school adolescents. Failing to tackle this runs the risk of imposing external monitoring and evaluation standards, while over-focusing on local norms and preferences can reiterate injustices, underestimating presence and levels of unmet need. These issues have been at the heart of poverty measurement given the relative nature of need and the difficulty of measuring its fulfilment, particularly among those most oppressed, excluded and impoverished. This paper presents the first adaptation of the Consensual Approach to co-produce measurement and evaluation of an SRHR project for out-of-school adolescent girls. The results show that SRHR-related rights and needs were widely endorsed, with little evidence of adaptive preference; yet deprivation was stark: education deprivation dominated (mainly due to affordability), roughly 20% lacked autonomy in key relationship aspects, and roughly 1/5 faced contraception barriers driven by norms. This paper argues that the Consensual Approach can improve the range and wording of existing SRHR questionnaires and provide a solid base for informing and assessing SRHR programmes reducing.