Does Digital Literacy Empower Adolescent Girls in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The vast majority (90%) of the world's adolescents aged 10–19 live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); and in those resource-limited settings, girls face distinct challenges across multiple health, social, and economic domains. Gender equality and girls' empowerment are key goals in their own right and are central to all other development goals. Digital literacy is a great enabler for the empowerment of young girls. This systematic review aims to assess the range and nature of digital literacy interventions implemented to empower adolescent girls in LMICs and identify evidence about adolescent girls' access and use of digital technologies in LMICs. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of studies following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) standards for systematic reviews. Two reviewers selected studies, conducted quality assessments, and extracted data by using standard forms. The collected data include the design of the study, type of digital literacy intervention, target audience, intervention received, intervention reach, data analysis, and study outcomes. The review is registered with PROSPERO (CRD42020216756). Results: Thirty-five studies met the eligibility for inclusion and of those, 11 were experimental studies (randomized controlled trial = 6; quasi-experimental = 2; before-after with no control = 3), 11 were cross-sectional/descriptive studies, seven studies used a mixed-method approach, and six were qualitative studies on digital literacy interventions to empower young girls in LMICs. The majority of digital literacy interventions were designed and implemented to improve sexual and reproductive health rights and decision-making of adolescent girls in LMICs ( n = 33). Only three papers reported the use of digital media for health-related information and decision making, while only one reported on educational and social empowerment. Discussion: Our findings suggest that digital literacy interventions such as mobile phones, mobile health tools, media exposure, access to the internet, internet-based educational strategies, social media exposure are effective to empower adolescent girls to access health services and information and also enhance the access to educational resources. However, we found inconclusive evidence on the effectiveness of digital literacy to enhance girls' access to financial services and economic empowerment. More rigorous studies with long-term follow-ups to assess the effectiveness of such interventions to empower adolescent girls in LMICs are urgently needed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it