How we know it works:

Starfish One by One envelopes each young woman with academic, peer and mentor support to ensure that she realizes her full potential. The innovative model is effectively tackling generations of poverty and exclusion. These young women’s point of departure is best demonstrated through the data collected from their mothers.

For mothers of Starfish Students:
• Average age at marriage: 18
• Average age at first birth: 19
• Average number of living children: 6
• Average years in formal schooling: 1.5

Starfish brakes this cycle at its root by ensuring that young women are not just educated, but empowered with knowledge, experience and skills in areas like reproductive education, financial literacy, health/nutrition, critical thinking and environmental stewardship.

The Starfish Monitoring and Evaluation System

In 2011, Starfish developed a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation system that individually tracks each Starfish student. This program, called Granitos de Arena (Grains of Sand), measures the individual progress of each student in the following 4 areas:
• Academic Performance to monitor her level of school access and success
• Emotional Development to measure her evolving self-esteem assertiveness/proactivity, and resiliency
• Social Integration to determine her access and use of community resources and social spaces that will benefit her and her family.
• Social Responsibility to monitor how she applies her unique gifts and talents for the betterment of her family and community.

The Granitos system represents Starfish’s belief in the need to continually innovate its program to provide ever-more effective methodologies to unlock the “Girl Effect.” Since 2008, 95% of the Starfish One by One students have been academically successful and stayed in the program. Some of the long-term results of this program are illustrated by the following graph.