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Poverty Ends with a 12 Year Old Girl: Empowerment and the Contradictions of International Development

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Poverty Ends with a 12 Year Old Girl: Empowerment and the Contradictions of International Development Bowdoin College Bowdoin Digital Commons Honors Projects Student Scholarship and Creative Work 2017 Poverty Ends with a 12 Year Old Girl: Empowerment and the Contradictions of International Development Meghan Elizabeth Bellerose Bowdoin College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/honorsprojects Part of the Inequality and Stratification Commons Recommended Citation Bellerose, Meghan Elizabeth, "Poverty Ends with a 12 Year Old Girl: Empowerment and the Contradictions of International Development" (2017). Honors Projects. 59. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/honorsprojects/59 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship and Creative Work at Bowdoin Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Poverty Ends with a 12 year Old Girl: Empowerment and the Contradictions of International Development An Honors Paper for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology By Meghan Bellerose Bowdoin College, 2017 ©2017 Meghan Elizabeth Bellerose Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................................. ii Glossary of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................................... iii 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 1 2. Research Methodology ..................................................................................................................................... 7 3. The “Third World” Adolescent Girl .......................................................................................................... 12 4. The Girl Effect ..................................................................................................................................................... 38 5. (Dis)empowering Adolescent Girls ........................................................................................................... 48 6. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................... 74 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................................. 79 i Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the tireless support and influence of several individuals. First and foremost, I want to thank Professor Nancy Riley for advising me throughout this process, for inspiring me think and write more critically, and for providing me with endless encouragement despite tough moments along the way. I am so grateful to have you as a mentor. In addition, I would like to thank my second honors reader Professor Oyman Basaran for his insightful feedback, challenging questions, and reassurance, as well as all of the members of the Department of Sociology for broadening my perspectives during my time at Bowdoin. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to the Bowdoin College McKeen Center staff for encouraging my passion for global health and providing the funding and support that made my internships in Ghana, Massachusetts, and D.C. possible. In particular, thank you to Janice Jaffe and Sarah Seames whose guidance over the past four years has meant the world to me. I am also deeply grateful to Sarah Bramley and Seung Lee of Save the Children’s International School Health and Nutrition team for giving me the opportunity to intern with them and providing me with a summer of inspiration. And of course, thank you to the interview subjects who allowed me to see into their worlds and generously gave their free time to share their knowledge and experiences with me for this project. Finally, thank you to my family for their unwavering support and to Will Ossoff for motivating me every day. ii Glossary of Abbreviations CAG – Coalition for Adolescent Girls CARE – Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere CGD – Center for Global Development DFID – Department for International Development GAP – Gender Action Plan IAC – Inter-African Committee ICAI – International Commission for Aid Impact ICRW – International Center for Research on Women INGO – International non-governmental organization Sida – Swedish International Development Corporation UNAIDS – United Nation’s Programme on HIV/AIDS UNICEF – United National Children’s Fund UNIFEM – United Nations Development Fund for Women WHO – World Health Organization iii 1. Introduction “50 million 12-year-old girls in poverty equal 50 million solutions. This is the power of The Girl Effect. An effect that starts with a 12-year-old girl and impacts the world” – Girl Effect, 2009 On International Day of the Girl Child, adolescent girls from ten countries gathered in the White House for the first screening of We Will Rise. The documentary, filmed throughout the summer of 2016, captures Michelle Obama’s travels to Liberia and Morocco to meet young women overcoming incredible odds to pursue an education. The film was produced as part of Let Girls Learn, Michelle and Barack Obama’s ongoing initiative to empower girls across the world to achieve their full potential. Since the campaign’s launch in 2015, the U.S. government has invested more than $1 billion dollars in Let Girls Learn programing in over 50 countries and has established nearly 100 private sector partnerships to promote adolescent girls’ empowerment. On October 11, 2016, the same date as the film’s release, the World Bank contributed to these efforts by pledging $2.5 billion dollars to the initiative to be distributed over the next five years. President of the World Bank Group, Jim Yong Kim, said of the investment, “Empowering and educating adolescent girls is one of the best ways to stop poverty from being passed from generation to generation. It can be transformational for entire societies” (World Bank 2016). Over the past decade, the international development community has increasingly focused on the power of adolescent girls to end global poverty. Let Girls Learn is only the latest in a series of initiatives seeking to empower and unite adolescent girls in the 1 global South1. From Plan International’s Because I am a Girl campaign to the United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up Program, proponents argue that girls are the key to unleashing economic growth in their communities and halting intergenerational poverty. Among these initiatives, the Nike Foundation’s, Girl Effect platform has had the widest influence on development programing and policy. The Nike Foundation defines The Girl Effect as “the unique potential of 250 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world” (Nike Foundation 2008). In 2010, Nicholas Kristof estimated that the first Girl Effect video had been viewed by over 10 million people, and in the years since, The Girl Effect has released three additional promotional videos boasting over 2 million views on YouTube (Kristof 2010). It is difficult to exaggerate the impact that The Girl Effect has had on development discourse and policy. Within a few years, the majority of the world’s major players in the fields of health and development had taken up The Girl Effect agenda. In 2007, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and World Health Organization (WHO) established the UN Interagency Task Force on Adolescent Girls. In 2008 the World Bank founded an Adolescent Girls Initiative, intended to improve young women’s economic opportunities; and in 2009, the World Economic Forum held its first ever plenary session on adolescent girls (Hickel 2014). By 2010, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) had launched Girl Hub, a collaboration with the Nike Foundation with the stated 1 In this thesis, I use the terms global North / South, Western / non-Western, and First World / Third World somewhat interchangeably. Building on Mohanty’s (2003) conceptualization of North and South, I am utilizing these words to distinguish between societies and nations that hold economic and political privilege or disadvantage relative to one another. 2 aim of scaling up the implementation of the Girl Effect. Then in October 2012, the first UN-designated International Day of the Girl Child was celebrated amid extensive public endorsement by NGOs and governmental bodies. Today, across the field of international development, adolescent girls are given special priority. At first sight, the investment in adolescent girls seems to be paying off. As adolescent girls have soared to the top of the development agenda, dramatic improvements in girls’ health and human rights have been documented across the world. In addition, today, more than ever before, sustainability, accountability, and transparency underlie programmatic efforts to support adolescent girls. However, I contend that despite their good intentions, international empowerment programs are damaging to girls in the developing world. In this thesis, I argue that international development programs focused on adolescent girls reproduce problematic and contradictory depictions of girls in the global South.
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