Faith actors and social norms shifting for adolescent health: A scoping review in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Abstract

Across low-and-middle income countries, adolescents navigate social environments where norms shape their opportunities and life trajectories. Faith actors are deeply embedded within these systems and often influence expectations related to communication, sexuality, reproductive health, and marriage. While faith engagement is widely recognized as important for sustainable change, empirical evidence on how faith actors contribute to social norm change remains limited. This paper presents findings from a 2024 scoping review of peer-reviewed and grey literature (2014-2024) examining how faith actors contribute to shifting norms and improving health and livelihood outcomes for adolescent girls and young women. Searches of seven bibliographic databases were supplemented by grey literature. Following deduplication, two reviewers independently screened records against predefined eligibility criteria. Seventeen interventions met inclusion criteria. Findings reveal substantial variation in faith actor engagement, alongside consistent gaps in reporting on intervention design, faith-related characteristics, and approaches to addressing resistance. Few studies explicitly measured social norms, limiting comparability. While the body of evidence remains under-reported, and mixed, there are several interventions which demonstrated shifts in attitudes, behaviors, and norms. The review highlights the need for stronger documentation, participatory design, and rigorous measurement to build evidence for ethical, scalable engagement of faith actors in gender-equitable programming.