Earning the badges: estimating the social value of Girlguiding

By Edward Bond, Economist and Data Analyst at State of Life

In our most recent work with Girlguiding, the UK's leading charity for girls and young women, we measured the potential impact of participation on wellbeing, and converted this impact into a monetary value. Girlguiding runs programmes for girls aged 4 to 18 through Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers, built around outdoor adventure, skill-building and community action.

Using survey data collected by Girlguiding, we set out to understand whether participation has an impact on girls' wellbeing, and what that might be worth to society.

Important context

Girls' wellbeing doesn't stay flat through childhood and adolescence - it drops sharply as girls move through their teenage years. In Active Lives and Understanding Society, the datasets used to construct comparison groups in the study, average life satisfaction for girls experienced a 17% decline between the ages of 7 and 18. By comparison, boys experienced an 11% decline.

This isn't an isolated finding: the UK's Good Childhood Report has tracked declining happiness among teenage girls specifically since the late 2000s, with the gap between girls and boys widening substantially over the past decade. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation has brought wide attention to this trend, pointing to smartphones, social media and body image pressures as key drivers.

It is against this backdrop that we study the impact that participation in Girlguiding has on the wellbeing of young girls.

Comparing like with like

We drew on over 2,000 responses from Girlguiding members aged 7 to 18, collected across three survey waves in 2024 and 2025, and compared their wellbeing against girls of the same age in two large national surveys: Understanding Society and Sport England's Active Lives. 

Since Girlguiding members aren't a random slice of the population - they're more likely, for instance, to live in more affluent areas - we used regression analysis to strip out the effect of this and other relevant factors before comparing wellbeing outcomes.

WELLBY analysis

State of Life were named advisors on guidance set out in HM Treasury's Green Book regarding the use of the WELLBY valuation method. In fact, our own Chief Economist, Allan Little, was a lead author. Using this guidance, we converted the estimated improvements in wellbeing into monetary values. 

For the 7 to 10 age group, we applied the C-WELLBY (also developed by Allan, alongside researchers at the LSE), a new children's wellbeing measure. This is one of the first real-world applications of the C-WELLBY to primary data, and we hope this analysis serves as a useful benchmark for future research looking to value the impact of programmes on younger children's wellbeing. 

What we found

We found that participation in Girlguiding was associated with increased wellbeing for young girls, equating to a social value of up to £9,900 per year for members aged 11 to 18, and up to £2,300 per year for younger members aged 7 to 10. Scaled up across the UK's Girlguiding membership, this amounts to up to £1.03 billion of social value generated every year.

The evidence suggests that rather than providing a boost to girls' wellbeing per se, Girlguiding membership acts as a wellbeing buffer against the decline seen more generally in the population throughout the teenage years. This is possibly down to the space Girlguiding provides - one where girls can develop new skills, build confidence, and find a sense of belonging within a community, even as the wider pressures of adolescence take hold.

Worth its weight in badges

At State of Life we value transparency and we are careful not to overclaim what the evidence can tell us. As such, it is important to note that our research design does not prove causality. It is possible that improvements in wellbeing among Girlguiding members relative to the population as a whole were driven by other factors that we were not able to observe.

Nonetheless, the evidence points to Girlguiding making a real, measurable difference to how young girls feel about their lives during a time in which many struggle with their mental health. What's more, that difference is potentially worth over £1 billion in social value per year. That has to be worth a badge!

More detailed findings from this research along with a technical report can be found on the Girlguiding impact page.