In rural Mozambique, girls commonly marry and have children before age 18. We use a Positive Youth Development lens to examine how constructs of confidence and competence were related to adolescent girls’ ability to and progress toward achieving their future aspirations. As part of an intervention evaluation, we used a longitudinal qualitative design, conducting in-depth interviews with 47 adolescent girls aged 13 to 19 at the end of the intervention and 1 year later. We explored adolescent girls’ future aspirations and examined their progress toward achieving their goals and three distinct groups emerged: (a) hopeful with self-efficacy, on track to reach goals; (b) hopeful with mixed levels of self-efficacy, not on track to reach goals; and (c) lacking hope and self-efficacy, not taking any actions to reach goals. Having hope and self-efficacy and behavioral competence enabled progress toward achieving goals, but poverty, early marriage, and childbearing were major obstacles. We conclude that fostering individual-level protective factors (e.g., hope and self-efficacy) is useful in interventions targeted toward young women to prevent pregnancy and child marriage, but that external assets (e.g., community, structural interventions) should be promoted to facilitate girls staying in school, provide sustainable economic opportunities, and improve adolescent contraceptive access and use.

中文翻译：

---

希望，自我效能和破碎的梦想：探讨莫桑比克农村少女的未来愿望与婚姻和生育的关系

在莫桑比克农村，女孩通常在18岁之前结婚并育有孩子。我们使用“积极青年发展”的镜头来检验自信和能力的建构与少女的能力和实现未来愿望的能力之间的关系。作为干预评估的一部分，我们使用了纵向定性设计，在干预结束时和一年后，对47名年龄在13至19岁的少女进行了深入访谈。我们探讨了少女的未来愿望，并考察了她们在实现其目标方面的进展，并形成了三个不同的群体：（a）有自我效能感的希望，有望实现目标；（b）希望自己的自我效能水平参差不齐，无法实现目标；（c）缺乏希望和自我效能感，没有采取任何行动来实现目标。有希望，自我效能感和行为能力使人能够朝着实现目标的方向前进，但是贫穷，早婚和生育是主要障碍。我们得出结论，在针对年轻妇女的预防怀孕和童婚的干预措施中，培养个人一级的保护因素（例如，希望和自我效能感）是有用的，但是应该促进外部资产（例如，社区，结构性干预措施）以促进女孩留在学校，提供可持续的经济机会，并改善青少年避孕药具的使用和使用。