Boys Mentoring, Gender Norms, and Reproductive Health-Potential for Transformation

Understanding and addressing the unique health and development needs of adolescent boys and young men (ABYM) is critical to achieving positive development outcomes for all genders. While major investments have been historically allocated toward adolescent girls and young women, a handful of approaches designed explicitly to reach ABYM have been successful. This review aims to understand the potential impact of mentoring interventions for ABYM on reproductive health (RH) knowledge and practices; social assets and soft skills; levels of gender-based and interpersonal violence; attitudes around gender equality; and substance use and financial vulnerability.

An electronic search of peer-reviewed and gray literature produced a review of 1,178 articles which yielded a total of 29 articles evaluating the 27 interventions included in the final review.

Mentoring approaches demonstrate promise for improving soft skills and social assets among ABYM-two factors that are thought to contribute to positive youth development outcomes-and for reducing violence perpetration. While these findings demonstrate the importance of this approach for ABYM in their own right, evidence regarding impact on gender norm transformation, RH, and substance use is mixed.

Mentoring programs appear to be a promising practice for ABYM; they have demonstrated the potential to improve soft skills and social assets, as well as to impact rates of violence perpetration. More research is needed to better understand why the evidence for impact on gender norm transformation, RH, and substance use is mixed, and how to build upon those programs that demonstrated positive results.