Limits of the ‘girls effect’

Focusing on adolescent girls to achieve major development goals is in vogue within development circles these days. It is not only major international donors who want to focus on girls, even multilateral corporations with social responsibility aspirations also think that investing in young girls across the developing world is a great idea, which can bring about enormous dividends. Whether young girls can be the key to overcoming a range of development challenges across the so-called ‘developing world’ however remains a contentious issue.

There is no dearth of images and stories showcasing how girls in poor countries are overcoming different forms of marginalisation using market-based models of development. The so-called ‘Girl Effect’ (there is even a large nonprofit by the name, created with support from the Nike Foundation) is premised on the belief that girls in developing countries have the potential to help overcome a range of pressing problems. Therefore, investing in girls’ education, for example, is not only considered a goal on its own, but also as the means to generate economic development, to achieve reproductive health goals, and even to conserve environmental resources.

Yet, several scholars have expressed concerns about the potential of young girls to deliver the multiple development outcomes being expected of them. Shifting the onerous task of addressing broader and bigger challenges of inadequate health provision or addressing environmental challenges on to the shoulders of young and poor girls is unfair.

Expecting that girls with a few more years of education, for example, can become empowered enough to delay marriage and have fewer children, and in turn help decrease pressure on environmental resources, while also boosting economic productivity are both over-ambitious and simplistic.

Such an approach is also problematic because it tries to depoliticise a range of structural problems facing women and girls. Empowerment projects promoting narrow types of entrepreneurial education, financial literacy, and the acquisition of economic assets are not enough. Such projects often do not aim for more holistic or transformative change. They do not address the racism, sexism or other barriers women or girls continue to experience even if they get access to credit or a basic education.

We have already seen how simplistic assumptions of trying to leverage market-based strategies to achieve a range of broader development goals do not work as well as expected. Muhammad Yunus was given a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on microfinance, based on the assumption that providing microloans to women would help secure much broader goals, including gender empowerment and reducing underlying causes of conflict within society.

Yet, emerging evidence has shown that access to a small loan does not automatically make women empowered. Many women who take microcredit loans hand over the money to their menfolk, or else they are compelled to work hard to repay high interest loans, while additionally managing their burden of raising children and running their households. Microfinance has even been accused of worsening domestic violence. Similarly, expecting girls to help achieve multiple development goals is problematic. It tries to deflect the responsibility of addressing development challenges away from those in positions of power, and those who are responsible for creating the broader circumstances which adversely impact the lives of not only girls, but women, and other poor and subordinated groups of people around the world.

We live in a lopsided world with inequitable distribution of resources. We see growing food wastage coexist with malnutrition and hunger, corporate profits keep skyrocketing amidst abusive labour conditions, and the gap between the haves and have-nots does not seem to be bridging. Tokenistic investment in girls’ empowerment programmes based on ‘self-sustaining’ projects, which increasingly rely on community cost sharing or corporate generosity do not have the potential to challenge and alter the underlying causes of inequality and deprivation.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 1^st, 2018.

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