Building Girls’ Power: Towards a new narrative of and for girls’ work
By Rosa Bransky, Jody Myrum, Ramatu Bangura, Zanele Sibanda, Fassil Marriam, and Chernor Bah.
In formalized philanthropy and development spaces, adolescent girls’ work has fallen into narrative traps that obscure the reality of life for the girls who are organizing every day to build a world that is more safe, fair, and free. As a result, funding strategies and programmatic practices continue to reinforce, rather than work to transform, the very systems and structures that have marginalized girls in the first place. There is a glaring need for a theory of practice for work that is uniquely of, for, and by adolescent girls. A theory of practice that understands girls as political actors and power holders in ways that are distinctly of this unique life stage. Together, we as long-time friends and co-conspirators in this work, are launching the ‘Building Girls Power’ series. A set of perspectives, case studies, and reflective tools for all those interested in doing more and better work with girls . ‘Building Girls Power’ is part of a multi-year project to document and amplify the theories and practices of political girls’ work.
Since time immemorial, girls have been organizing and agitating in their communities, pushing back against the everyday oppressions that are so often synonymous with girlhood. In their individual relationships, their families, homes, communities and countries, their resistance has always sparked and sustained transformational change. If as in the phrase coined by Foucault; where there is power, there is resistance, so too, our work shows us that wherever there is resistance, there are girls.
But because there is no coherent field or theorem that centers girls’ power, girls find themselves at the mercy of overlapping and often competing perspectives and approaches — including child protection, violence against children, youth work, women’s rights, violence against women, humanitarian aid, and development. Each of these spaces has a set of distinct, though overlapping, financing models, practices and organizing principles. They are often underpinned by formalized international instruments or broad-based social theories that are well articulated and documented.
At best, girls are being supported through formal institutions using tools that were never really designed for girls or with girls. At worst, they are falling through the cracks entirely. Girls experience these cracks in obvious, day-to-day inequalities, like a lack of basic community services designed specifically for them. Less visible, and thus harder to combat and transform, are the forces that allocate resources at the national and international level without considering girls’ unique needs and perspectives.
In short, there is a glaring need for a theory of practice for work that is uniquely of, for, and by adolescent girls. A theory of practice that offers a coherent approach to the work, starting with, indeed centering on girls in all their messiness and lived reality, and yet which is also conceivable in consort with the formalized sectors through which the money still ultimately flows. To do this, we must first begin by critically analyzing the stories we tell ourselves about girls, asking where and how these stories are obscuring the realities of life at the unique moment of adolescence.
Mainstream development and social change work has fallen into narrative traps that too often look at girls as vulnerable children who need protection or, conversely, as superstar potential leaders who can pull themselves and their communities out of poverty if given the right doses of information and empowerment.
Indeed, there are myths about girls and girlhood scattered across our field that drive funding models and decisions, and which have become literal barriers in the way of girls. Dominant narratives erase who and what is responsible for creating systematic harm, taking us away from approaches that might actually address the oppressive systems at the root of girls’ marginalization.
None of these stories about girls’ work centre a full and expansive understanding of girls’ social, sexual, and economic lives. None are able to fully grasp the paradoxical reality of the deep power all girls hold in the context of compounding systems and structures of oppression.
For way too long we have, all of us, been stuck in an endless loop of debate about the level of agency we can ascribe as resting with individual girls, as if there were a neat correlation between increasing age and levels of agency, and thus, a simple age-based equation to assess a person’s need for protection or ability for action.
It is clear to anyone working with girls, that even at relatively young ages, they are making complex decisions for themselves. Every day, girls are succeeding in making the best of their circumstances by deploying a range of sophisticated strategies, connecting with their peers and with social change processes on a micro and macro scale, in ways unique to the particular life stage of adolescence. It is equally clear that girls are choosing among a restrictive and often dehumanizing palette of options, with limited access to assets, information, services or networks of social solidarity. Rather than a tension to resolve, these are a set of truths that we must learn to hold. Of girls’ right to be held, to heal, to play and to lead. That is what it means, by very definition, to be a girl — to live at the apex of power and vulnerability.
However we conceptualize agency in our discussions, our primary aim should be to contribute towards transformation in girls’ lives, and in order to understand how to do that, we need our analysis to move beyond the question of complicity or force of actor or acted upon, and into the precise nature of the cultural and social structures which constrain (or have the capacity to contribute towards the liberation of) girls. Right now, we, us adults and so-called allies of girls, have got the question wrong. Instead of asking, in our own ways and own phrases, over and over, whether girls are indeed powerful, we should instead be asking how do we build power with girls?
Ultimately, building girls’ power is the only route to creating real, embedded, long-term transformational change. But for too long we have pushed discussions of power to the margins of girls’ work, falling back instead on the sanitized ‘empowerment’ agenda which has itself become its own kind of paradigm — depoliticised and individualized to such a degree that the power has all but been erased. Building girls’ power is political work, it is feminist work, it is justice work. But nor should power ever be the antithesis of child protection or child rights work, because power is itself the greatest protective force against systems of domination. Power is protective. Building girls’ power needs to be the work of all of us, whatever sector and theoretical frameworks we begin from.
But what does this mean in practice for those committed to more and better work with girls? We have come together as long-time friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators to document and share some of our own journey towards a more politicized way of understanding girls’ work — through illustrative case studies, social theory, and practice based tools for all those interested in doing this work better too. The lessons we share come from decades of work by us and our organizations, working at both the community level with girls and at the global level with funders and policymakers, and always through deep dialogue and debate with the girl activists we learn from every day about what it means to build a world that is more just, and fair, and free.
But this is not a toolkit nor a roadmap to a power building programme. This work is inherently complex, expansive and contextually specific. It is by its very nature, only power building work if it is activated and catalyzed by girls themselves — if it builds girls’ power through its very form, function, and design. There is no shortcut here. There is no innovation lab that will save us. There are only girls, and what they tell us they need, and the resources and intellectual capacities we can mobilize as adults and allies. Together, we might just lay the seeds of a world where all girls everywhere can live into the fullness of their power, and as they do, watch in awe as the world as we know it, transforms.
Read the Building Girls’ Power publication here!
Register for our special Building Girls’ Power event here!
