Measuring Adolescents’ Life Skills and Values: Method and Results from East Africa

The goals of the ALiVE initiative, to capture and disseminate estimates of adolescents’ life skills and values at a level that would provide valuable information to ministries of education, guided the development of an assessment tool. The aim was to produce a tool that had the capacity to assess the proficiencies of adolescents in East Africa through a household-based approach. This approach required that the tool could capture these cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal capacities; not rely on knowledge and skills built through formal education; and would be compatible with oral administration of the assessment with participating adolescents. The process of development is described as taking place within these parameters. Results from the assessment of 45,442 adolescents across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda are presented following the technical information generated through the test and scale development process. The patterns of results are uniformly similar across each of the education systems, although there are some slight differences in levels of proficiencies. The outcomes provide confidence in the test and scale development processes followed, and in the use of household-based assessment for measurement of life skills and values.