A research project in Zambia has demonstrated that teaching young women negotiation skills can have a long-term impact on their economic prospects. The study, led by US academics and spanning more than a decade, found that girls who received just 12 hours of negotiation training over three weeks were more likely to stay in school, graduate from college, and less likely to marry a much older man, compared to a control group.
Project design and initial findings
The project involved groups of 12- and 13-year-old girls who were given negotiation classes, delivered by local young women who had completed their schooling and had been closely involved in developing the curriculum. The control group received “empowerment” classes from the same coaches but without the negotiation component.
Prof Corinne Low, an economics professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, has been involved from the project's inception. She said the Zambian government was initially interested in understanding what was preventing girls from attending secondary school. Focus groups revealed that girls were keen to attend but unable to convince their parents or relatives to pay the fees. “There was misunderstanding in the relationships that they had – it would be, ‘I know that my son is going to help support me,’ or, ‘my son is going to look out for the family, but my daughter, she’s going to get into trouble with boys,’” Low explained.
Curriculum and approach
Low and colleague Nava Ashraf concluded that the girls could benefit from negotiating skills similar to those taught to MBA students in the US. The most important insight in the six two-hour classes was that instead of seeing the person you’re negotiating with as an enemy, a more successful approach is to understand their perspective and tackle problems together. “We really emphasised this sort of understanding somebody else’s interests; understanding somebody else’s problems,” she said.
Counterintuitively, the curriculum also leant heavily on respecting existing hierarchies. “In Zambia, there was a lot of generational hierarchy and it was really important to show respect for parents. We talked to the girls and said: ‘If you’re going to approach your parents to ask them for something, what are some of the ways you show respect?’ And they said: ‘Oh well, I might kneel down, and I might address them formally, and I might wear a traditional wrapper – a chitenge.’” Low acknowledged the irony: “What kind of empowerment programme is teaching girls to kneel down?” But she added: “The reality is that these girls do not have the power in their household and we can’t pretend that they do.”
Long-term impact and replication
Follow-up surveys showed that parents felt their relationships with their daughters had improved. “The parents recorded that the girls were more respectful, were more likely to do chores around the household, that they were more understanding,” Low recalled. The team is now working towards a 15-year follow-up with the original cohort, now women in their 20s. The approach has been incorporated into the Zambian curriculum and replicated in several other countries.
Most recently, the NGO Free to Run has used an adapted version of the material in online classes reaching about 1,200 girls in Afghanistan. Sana Mahmud, the charity’s global programmes manager, said the curriculum is helping young women manage their mental health and achieve small freedoms. “It’s a very useful skill inside the household to negotiate with parents, even if it’s small things like permission to visit a friend,” she said. Mahmud also noted that young women sometimes leave their homes to go to the market or run errands and have been stopped by Taliban members asking what they are doing. “We realised that the skill of negotiation is probably the best for them to safely talk about what they’re doing, why they’re there.” The course is taught by four Afghan women, and feedback from participants has been “amazing”, Mahmud said.
While the wider economic and political system matters far more than each woman’s success in navigating it, giving more girls skills that might help them further their own interests in the world as it is today seems a wise investment in that future.
