6. Conclusion
ADVERSE EFFECTS
The TARA intervention contributed to the development of the strategies for engaging and empowering adolescent girls through augmenting health and nutrition issues in the widely used PACE curriculum and also implementing this in community-based settings. Both the changes are extremely important as adolescent well-being cannot be discussed in isolation with health and nutrition concerns and also that reaching out to these in rural settings warrants a community centric platform as school settings may have both time and participation constraints. It is encouraging that the intervention shows a discernible impact of PACE++ curriculum training on a range of indicators associated with women empowerment and adolescent health and nutrition. The intervention also highlights the feasibility of delivering the modified PACE curriculum in rural settings and the scope for leveraging community platforms such as SHGs for program roll out. This provides further opportunities to scale up these through government initiatives such as SRLM and JEEViKA. The findings overall are encouraging but they also reveal new challenges such as dietary practices among adolescent girls that has huge implications on population health and well-being. Notwithstanding program impact and effect size, greater caution is warranted while scaling up of such models. In particular, appropriate contextualization of the session tools and implementation techniques has an instrumental role to play. Before concluding, it is worth reiterating the adverse effects that adversities such as pandemics can have on adolescent lives. During such testing times the social capital of adolescent group forums and platforms can be of high relevance and support. To conclude, the TARA intervention showcases the importance of delivering the modified PACE++ curriculum in rural settings through leveraging community platforms. The linkages of the program with established government institutions and initiatives boost the sustainability prospects of the initiative. The pilot, therefore, provides robust evidence for upscaling, replicating and promoting similar programs to reach out to all adolescent girls in India and elsewhere.