Abstract
Can empowered girls change the economic trajectory of families, communities, and nations? According to the logic of the “Girl Effect” theory of economic and demographic change, investing resources in poor adolescent girls—especially for education and prevention of early marriage and early childbirth—will ultimately result in improved economic status for the girls, their future children, and ultimately their broader communities. In this chapter, Brown analyzes discursive constructions of girls as objects of global development policy beginning with the emergence of girls as an international political issue, and tracing the process by which adolescent girls came to be represented as “the most powerful force of change on the planet.” The author concludes with a discussion of the silences and omissions in this framing of adolescent girls.
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Notes
- 1.
World Bank (n.d.) Adolescent Girls Initiative from 2008 to 2015; Millennium Development Goals and later Sustainable Development Goals aspects related to girls and women.
- 2.
United Nations Girls Education Initiative (n.d.) works to improve the quality and availability of girls’ education in support of Sustainable Development Goals related to gender and education.
- 3.
The U.S. government’s Global Health Initiative (a coordinated effort including the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID], the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS] including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] and its other agencies], PEPFAR, Peace Corps, and the Department of Defense) has as one of several guiding principles a “women, girl and gender-equity approach” (U.S. Department of State 2012).
- 4.
Examples include the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) briefing paper by Ward and March (2006) which focuses on sexual violence against women and girls in war and UN Security Council (2000) Resolution 1325 adopted by the Security Council at its 4213th meeting in October 2000 which also addresses girls in conflict situations.
- 5.
I have argued elsewhere that the institutions and practices of international women’s and children’s rights formed one important foundation for the emergence of girls on international policy agendas. In addition, evolving discourses of international development that brought gender to the forefront helped to lay the groundwork for these changes (Thompson 2002).
- 6.
As I have argued, elsewhere (Brown 2020), discourse analysis here is “an engagement with meaning and the linguistic and communicative processes through which social reality is constructed…[or] the space where intersubjective meaning is created, sustained, transformed and, accordingly, becomes constitutive of social reality” (Holzlscheiter 2014, 144).
- 7.
The focus on the ‘girl-child’ in the Bei**g Platform for Action and by UN agencies intends “to recognize girls’ rights and the unique challenges girls face around the world” (UNESCO, n.d., para. 1).
- 8.
Zwingel (2012, 123) highlights the work distinguishing global from transnational: While the notion of “global feminism” focuses on the influence of women’s organizations within state dominated international policy arenas, “transnational feminism” emphasizes the contextualized diversity of women’s struggles. My use of global in this paper does not intend to convey a homogenizing stance; rather, it points to the existence of a global political space that is neither solely international nor transnational.
- 9.
Correspondence and meeting minutes from the Working Group on the Girl Child, NGO Committee on UNICEF.
- 10.
Individual capacity development figures centrally in neoliberal prescriptions for economic development.
- 11.
The 1924 Declaration of Geneva adopted by the League of Nations and drafted by Save the Children International Union and later the 1959 UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child adopted by the UN General Assembly offered precursors for the CRC.
- 12.
The United States is the only United Nations member state that is not a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations Treaty Collection 1989).
- 13.
Moeller’s (2018) analysis of the key role of corporations and corporate foundations in promoting the Girl Effect and related development policies argues that the Girl Effect represents not merely a neoliberalized and financialized model of change, but a corporatized form of international development.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the intellectual and moral support and feedback from Deborah Levison, MJ Maynes, and Frances Vavrus, co-convenors of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (University of Minnesota) Research Circle on Youth as Subjects, Objects and Agents (YaSOA), in the development of this chapter. My work in this chapter also benefitted greatly from the ideas and comments of other members of YaSOA as well as the very capable research assistance of Anuradha Sajjanhar, Maurice Sikenyi, and Mitchell LeGrand.
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Brown, K. (2021). Global Girl Policy and the Girl Effect: Gendered Origins and Silences. In: Levison, D., Maynes, M.J., Vavrus, F. (eds) Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63632-6_11
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