Hope, Self-Efficacy, and Crushed Dreams: Exploring How Adolescent Girls' Future Aspirations Relate to Marriage and Childbearing in Rural Mozambique

In rural Mozambique, girls commonly marry and have children before age 18. We use a Positive Youth Development lens to examine how constructs of confidence and competence were related to adolescent girls' ability to and progress toward achieving their future aspirations. As part of an intervention evaluation, we used a longitudinal qualitative design, conducting in-depth interviews with 47 adolescent girls aged 13 to 19 at the end of the intervention and 1 year later. We explored adolescent girls' future aspirations and examined their progress toward achieving their goals and three distinct groups emerged: (a) hopeful with self-efficacy, on track to reach goals; (b) hopeful with mixed levels of self-efficacy, not on track to reach goals; and (c) lacking hope and self-efficacy, not taking any actions to reach goals. Having hope and self-efficacy and behavioral competence enabled progress toward achieving goals, but poverty, early marriage, and childbearing were major obstacles. We conclude that fostering individual-level protective factors (e.g., hope and self-efficacy) is useful in interventions targeted toward young women to prevent pregnancy and child marriage, but that external assets (e.g., community, structural interventions) should be promoted to facilitate girls staying in school, provide sustainable economic opportunities, and improve adolescent contraceptive access and use.