United We Stand

This rather angry blog post lambasting Plan’s use of pink and other hyper-feminine symbols was published recently in ‘This Magazine’ (Canada). I’ll say right off the bat in case someone is eagerly expecting a passionate defence: I won’t use this space to justify Plan’s marketing decisions. Actually I’m quite happy for people to engage in a healthy debate on marketing messages; especially those who intend to change social injustices through fundraising (see here for my blog on the ‘the girl store’). I would, however, like to use Wendy Glauser’s analysis to talk about an issue that goes to the very heart of the feminist movement:

Radical Feminism vs. Liberal Feminism.

Radical feminists believe that change will only come from completely dismantling the hegemonic patriarchal social system. This is epitomized by Audrey Lorde’s famous essay (1979): “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

Liberal feminists on the other hand are very happy to use the master’s tools against the master. They believe that you can subvert the system from within through political and legal reform. Catharine MacKinnon is a good example (2007): “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights defines what a human being is. In 1948, it told the world what a person, as a person, is entitled to. It has been fifty years. Are women human yet?…If women were human, would we have so little voice in public deliberations and in governments in the countries where we live? Would we be hidden behind veils and imprisoned in houses and stoned and shot for refusing? Would be beaten nearly to death, and to death, by men with whom we are close? Would we be sexually molested in our families? Would we be raped in genocide to terrorize and eject and destroy our ethnic communities, and raped again in that undeclared war that goes on every day in every country in the world in what is called peacetime? If women were human, would our violation be enjoyed by our violators? And if we were human, when these things happened, would virtually nothing be done about it?”

And so we hear this debate echoed everyday. For some of us the only way to affect real change is through a radical political movement (through, according to Glauser, ‘sabotage…mobilization…disruption’). For others the best way to really change lives is by using the only tools we have, the language of human rights or the color pink, to try and change hearts and minds. Both methods are needed and both can co-exist side by side.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. I would like, for at least 24 hours, to see all feminists stand together in solidarity and respect, compassion and friendship.

For if we won’t support each other then surely the master has already won.

Keshet Bachan

Young women and the global economy

A short interview I gave the International Trade Centre (part of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization) on the 1st expert roundtable on the gender dimensions of aid for trade:

For more on girls and labour force participation go to the 2009 ‘Because I am a Girl Report: Girls in the Global Economy – Adding it All Up’: http://plan-international.org/girls/resources/publications.php

Keshet Bachan

Girls take New York by (snow) storm!

It’s still very early here in New York and still dark – outside my window the Chrysler building is obscured by the swirling flakes. What am I doing in NY in the middle of a blizzard? I’m here for the most important global meeting of women’s organizations in the world, the Commission on the Status of Women. Every year the United Nations spends two weeks discussing the issues that women and girls face across the globe and comes up with a document called ‘The Agreed Conclusions’ which in turn influences policy and budget allocations at member state level. In other words, the document that is produced by the end of this conference will be used by us, Civil Society, to hold governments to account and say – hey! You signed up to this document promising more investment in girls education, now show me the money!

But it’s not enough that policy specialists and thematic experts and well known academics have their say. In fact, what’s really important is to make sure the real experiences of girls and boys from the countries who most need the help of huge influential bodies like the United Nations, are heard and taken into account. That’s why this year Plan International has brought together a phenomenal delegation of 13 girls from Finland, Canada, USA, Sierra Leon, Cameroon and Indonesia. They are here to make sure the United Nations listens to their perspective, to their thoughts and ambitions and dreams and fears and hopes and needs.

The girls arrived here and the first thing we heard was – it’s so cold! Yes, the girls seemed surprised by the low temperature, but had a great time piling on various coloured articles of clothing to create a dazzling array miss-matched outfits! Needless to say, the rest of us are faring no better bundled up in so many layers we waddle like ducks.

It may be cold out there – but it’s warm in our ‘girl friendly’ zone! One of our hotel rooms has been converted into a ‘girl space’ where they hang out together and spend their free time. This year the theme of the Commission on the Status of Women is the role of Information Communication Technology in women and girls empowerment. Well, they should simply come visit our girl-zone. They’ll see girls from different corners of the earth all similarly concerned with checking emails and updating their status on facebook, with very little regard to the differences of language, culture and background. These barriers have all but disappeared in the place where being an adolescent girl meets virtual space.

The girls have been flooded with requests to come speak at very high level panels and they have responded with enthusiasm! Eager to get their message out there, that girls are already tech savvy and the world needs to get with the program, they are spending the day polishing their speeches, tweeting and writing blog posts. Stay tuned for more as Plan’s girl-delegation takes the CSW by (snow?) storm!

If you want to hear more from the girls follow: @Plan_Youth or visit: planyouth.tumblr.com

Stay tuned for more updates from me as the week continues!!

Keshet Bachan

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Friendly folks on twitter recently brought this website http://www.the-girl-store.org/shop to my attention out of a strong sense of outrage which they assumed would be shared by every person with a drop of common sense and a gender equality expert like myself in particular. I urge readers to take a deep breath, align your chakras, make a relaxing cup of herbal tea, take a seat and check out the website. Once you’ve scraped your jaw off the floor, read on.

The website seems to be a fundraising strategy by Nanhi Kali an INGO working in India towards empowering girls through basic education. From the small amount of information available on their website their approach seems straightforward, provision of school supplies, which they assured me (the innocent reader) would make the difference between a girl ending up an empowered young woman and the self-same girl ending up a sexually exploited prostitute.

I don’t want this post to become a specific critique of one campaign, however much it galls me. I would like to focus instead on all campaigns, and on messages we (the development industry) sometimes send to our public which in effect do more harm than good to our constituency.

It’s so easy in the world of ever shrinking aid budgets, and the almost non-existent arena of funding for gender-equality related programming, to decide that every means are sanctified by our end goal. I beg to disagree.

Using the exact same narrative that has for centuries untold enslaved girls and women, under the unrelenting yoke of patriarchy, to the grinding despair of violence and exploitation cannot be sanctioned. Even if this means an increase in funding for transformative and even life saving programming, it cannot be abided. Civil society organizations, much like doctors, have a duty to first do no harm. By perpetuating a story that disempowers your constituency, commodifies them, objectifies them and sells them to the highest bidder in the name of ‘charity’ is beyond the pale.

Other campaigns have perpetrated similar ‘crimes against development’ by portraying crying children with distended stomachs as well as children with scarred and disfigured faces. It never ceases to surprise me that the rules that govern charitable campaigns for local causes are thrown out with the bathwater when it comes to charitable campaigns for the ‘exotic poor’. Regardless, by adding a gendered lens of analysis to these campaigns I find that the undertone of sexuality is a singularly unique attribute of ‘girl empowerment’ campaigns. Granted, girls are sexualized by society from the moment they hit puberty and become reproductive beings. And this is an important divergence which more than any other factor significantly alters their life trajectory when compared to boys.

However, it is our understanding of this issue that makes us doubly responsible for not abusing it in our messaging. Yes, adolescent girls have a right to say no, but they also have a right to say yes and it’s important that we don’t deny them that right by making it a zero sum game. You’re either chaste and in school or a prostitute. Surely we can imagine a broader spectrum of future possibilities for our daughters, and nieces and sisters? Surely we want a message of agency, of self fulfilment and self-respect to be at the core of any call to action?

I hope other campaigns that use disempowering dichotomies (‘you’re either poor and pregnant, or you get a loan and buy a cow’…) find a way of creating a more nuanced story without losing its desired effect. For now, I can only wait for the day girls in poor communities rise up and tell us their own stories themselves, without the ‘interpretation’ of well-meaning charities, and hope this day comes soon.

Keshet Bachan

“Children” – on misuse and abuse

Recently I was invited to speak at an event on ‘street children’ which brought together practitioners and policy makers for an entire day of presentations and discussions. A facilitator who ran a 4 day workshop in South Africa with teenage girls and boys living and working on the streets was presenting her work and gave us one example of an ‘exercise’ she conducted: by way of illustrating how children from every country face the same difficulties on the streets, she asked them all to pick a number from 1-5 which represents their access to healthcare on the streets, 1 being no access and 5 being full access. She was surprised that most of the boys ended up in group five, and the girls were mostly at the lower end, with three girls from Zambia who stood together at the end of the line and began crying. ‘They were both embarrassed and ashamed to admit they have no access to healthcare when they need it especially in front of the boys who all stood at number 5 and were cajoling the girls to join them at the front of the line. The crying girls refused.’

This story illustrates to me how even the most experienced participation specialist can get it seriously wrong if they ignore two critical factors that intersect to create a particular vulnerability: gender and age.

Firstly, the facilitator ignored the unequal dynamics of power between street girls and street boys in the group. All girls are vulnerable to male abuse and domination to various degrees. Although boys experience particular kinds of challenges, overwhelmingly it is girls who are on the receiving end of gender based violence and various forms of exploitation. For girls living on the streets, vulnerability to sexual violence from men (such as police officers, pimps or clients) or boys their own age (boyfriends, fellow gang members) is acute. By not taking this into consideration beforehand the facilitator ignored how a person’s gender defines their lived experiences as a whole, and more to the point, impacts their access to basic rights.

Secondly, by defining teenagers as ‘children’ the facilitator was deliberately ignoring the sexual nature of the abuses these girls were facing and that most of them survived on the street by virtue of being sexually active. She was also ignoring the sexualized way in which the street boys might view these street girls, and how this would inevitably inform the mood in the workshop.

Over and over again I see the way in which people misuse the word children. Sometimes using that word will mean projects directed at girls and boys will only ever reach boys because they didn’t consider the different challenges girls might face in accessing the project. Sometimes it means girls will continue to face sexual abuse from their peers because the word ‘children’ conveniently glossed over the fact that we are dealing with adolescents. And sometimes using that word will mean that three girls end up crying in a corner because no one thought that maybe they don’t want to expose their vulnerability in front of 18 boys who don’t even understand what they’re crying about.

Keshet Bachan

Gender and Development – reading list!

I have been getting a number of requests lately for information on gender and development from folks on twitter and so decided to pull together a basic list. These sources are ‘ an introduction to gender and development’ and lay the foundations to most of the work gender advisors do on a day to day basis. I also add a short list of feminist theories which underpin a lot of gender and development thought.  Still to come – list resources on ‘girls in development’. Watch this space!

List of gender and development resources

A. Cornwall, E.Harrison & A.Whitehead (Eds) Feminisms in Development, 2007; http://www.amazon.com/Feminisms-Development-Contradictions-Contestations-Challenges/dp/1842778196

A. Cornwall and M.Molyneux (Eds) The Politics of Rights: Dilemmas for Feminist Praxis, 2008; http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415459068/

A Sen, Development as Freedom, Anchor Books, 2000.

http://tinyurl.com/3946dxo

A Escobar, Encountering Development, Princeton University Press, 1999; http://tinyurl.com/2w7kctl

Chant & M Gutmann, Mainstreaming Men into Gender and Development: Debates, Reflections and Experiences, 2000; http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mainstreaming-Men-into-Gender-Development/dp/0855984511

C Jackson & R Pearson (Eds), Feminist Visions of Development, 1998; http://www.amazon.com/Feminist-Visions-Development-Routledge-Economics/dp/0415157900

C Moser, Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training, Rutledge 1993; http://www.amazon.com/Women-Gender-Development-Reader/dp/1856491420/ref=pd_sim_b_1

C March, I Smyth & M Mukhopadhyay, a guide to gender analysis frameworks, Oxfam, 1999; http://tinyurl.com/37qmvs6

D Perrons, Globalization and Social Change, Routledge 2004;

http://tinyurl.com/35wjp43

H Afshar & S Barrientos (Eds), Women, Globalisation and Fragmentation in the Developing World, 1999; http://www.amazon.com/Globalization-Fragmentation-Developing-Womens-Studies/dp/0312216599 

M Marchand & J Parpart (Ed), Feminism/Postmodernism/Development, 1995; http://www.amazon.co.uk/Feminism-Postmodernism-Development-Routledge-International/dp/0415105242

Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 1999; http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Social-Justice-Martha-Nussbaum/dp/0195110323

N Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, Verso (1994); http://www.amazon.com/Reversed-Realities-Naila-Kabeer/dp/0860915840

N Kabeer, Gender Mainstreaming in Poverty Eradication and the Millennium Development Goals, 2003; http://publicwebsite.idrc.ca/EN/Resources/Publications/Pages/IDRCBookDetails.aspx?PublicationID=229

S. Chant Gender, Generation and Poverty, 2007; http://www.e-elgar.com/Bookentry_Main.lasso?id=3550

S. Chant (ed) 2010 International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy, Edward Elgar. http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/bookentry_main.lasso?id=13431

Women, Gender and Development Reader, Zed Books, 1997; http://www.amazon.com/Women-Gender-Development-Reader/dp/1856491420/ref=pd_sim_b_1 

 

 

Feminist Theory underpinning a lot of gender and development theory

G Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza / La Frontera, 1999; http://www.amazon.com/Borderlands-Mestiza-Frontera-Gloria-Anzald%C3%BAa/dp/1879960567

bell hooks, feminism is for everybody, 2000; http://www.amazon.com/Feminism-Everybody-Passionate-bell-hooks/dp/0896086283 (and really everything else she’s written)

C Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 2000; http://www.amazon.com/Methodology-Oppressed-Chela-Sandoval/dp/0816627371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292245689&sr=1-1-spell

A Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1984; http://www.amazon.com/Sister-Outsider-Speeches-Crossing-Feminist/dp/0895941414 (‘The masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house’)

C Moraga & G Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour, 1984; http://www.amazon.com/This-Bridge-Called-My-Back/dp/091317503X/ref=pd_sim_b_20

E Shohat, Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, MIT press, 2001; http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Visions-Multicultural-Feminism-Transnational/dp/0262692619/ref=pd_sim_b_4

C Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, Duke Press, 2003; http://www.amazon.com/Feminism-without-Borders-Decolonizing-Practicing/dp/0822330210/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292245342&sr=1-1

I Grewal & C Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, 1994: http://www.amazon.com/Scattered-Hegemonies-Postmodernity-Transnational-Practices/dp/0816621381/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1292245455&sr=1-1

P Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Unwin Hyman (1990); http://www.amazon.com/Black-Feminist-Thought-Consciousness-Empowerment/dp/0415924847

Please feel free to comment and add resources!

Keshet Bachan

Reclaim the Streets

The dust has settled on the launch of this year’s report, at least in the UK and I have had time to think about some of the responses we have had.  As part of our analysis of safety in the city we did a survey in several cities in the UK asking girls and young women here about how safe they felt.  They said much the same thing as girls in India, Ethiopia, Holland and anywhere else we gathered information from – many felt unsafe, many experienced harassment of various sorts – a staggering 42% of girls aged 11-18 in Britain’s largest cities know someone who has been assaulted in their own neighbourhood and 90% girls aged 11-18 think police on the streets would be effective in making them feel safer. Harassment on public transport was a theme all over the world. It was a bleak picture and though violence on the street is not just confined to girls, the sense of sexual vulnerability was very apparent. 

The UK survey results were picked up by lots of local radio stations and I did several interviews.  A common and depressing reaction from the primarily male interviewers was a fairly basic “she asked for it” attitude.  If girls did not go out after dark, they would not be at risk, if they did not dress “like that” they would not be targeted. They saw young women as stumbling about drunk coming out of clubs and, by implication, fair game. One of the stations did a series of vox pops with school girls who talked about going out with their friends and being pursued by men of all ages, it was impossible, they said, to make it clear that they wanted to be left alone, they did not want the attention. Most young women will recognize this.  You go out to have a good time, you don’t want to feel preyed upon, no does mean no. Why should you stay at home after dark – 4pm in the winter – why should the streets of our cities be dangerous and often distressing places – why is the responsibility on the girls?  

The men who interviewed me would, I am sure, have been devastated had their own sisters or girlfriends been attacked.  Why is violence and sexual harassment justifiable because it is dark or because you wear a short skirt and high heels, or because you have had too much to drink. Why should that mean that you want complete strangers to shout at you, follow you or touch you. Why be so unsympathetic to the fear that women and girls experience. I live near a common which is a short cut, along a lit pathway, between various friends’ houses. I resent the fact that I am nearly always too afraid to take the short cut if I am alone in the evening, while my bloke will stride through it almost unthinkingly. Sometimes I make myself do it just to “reclaim the streets” because it makes me angry to be afraid. I feel it is a risk and I don’t enjoy it. I am also quite certain that if I am attacked on one of these trips it will be seen as my fault for taking the risk – walking across a common in the evening!

Sharon Goulds

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

Yesterday I read this great post by Siobhan Foran (UNICEF) lamenting two things:

1. That when folks use the word gender, they mean girls.
2. That they tick the gender box in their program proposals by using cryptic sentences like ‘with special attention to girls’.

I have to say it really gets my goat when people casually replace the word women or girls with gender. And not just because this effectively ignores the needs of boys and men. But because it strips the word gender of all its political power.

Some basics (and if this is ‘duh’ to you, skip it):

Sex is: the biological differences between males and females.

Gender is: the social and cultural constructions of masculinities and femininities. In other words gender represents assumptions about what men and boys should do and what women and girls should do in society. Moreover, gender is about the relationships between women and men, girls and boys and the way these relationships are socially constructed.

The word ‘Gender’ allows us to see power differences. If our lens of analysis is not comparing two groups, but only looking at women/girls as a distinct group, then we lose our ability to uncover unjust imbalances.

More importantly, gender allows us to take action. If attitudes and expectations are socially constructed, then surely they change from place to place, they change over time, and they can be changed if we try very hard.

The second point Siobhan Foran made regarding programmatic responses that have supposedly mainstreamed gender by claiming to put in place ‘special considerations for girls’ is indeed an annoying habit. I would hope donors would simply stop handing out funds to organizations that submit proposals using sentences of that ilk.

I would like to take a moment though and focus on what I perceive to be the root cause of these “badaid” proposals – gender blindness.

A bit of feminist theory (no, you can’t skip this bit):

Ruth Frankenburg is an American feminist well-known for theorizing ‘whiteness’. By making being ‘white’ visible one can see and thus undermine the power of whiteness as a “location of structural advantage” that sustains racism. Being aware of ones privilege (this can be a privilege of location ‘global north’/‘global south’, or a privilege of race or of gender etc.) is important because our ‘privilege’ informs our knowledge, our opinions, our attitudes and our actions. Frankenburg argues that we must understand the subject position of the oppressor if we are to understand that of the oppressed. 

So, by being gender blind and aiming an aid program at ‘children’ or ‘youth’ we are ignoring that not all the people in that category face the same challenges or have the same privileges (which we might want to capitalize on). We also ignore the group power dynamics which could seriously affect the success of our project.

Frakenburg also argues that whiteness has always been visible for most non-white people.  “Color-blindness” stems from racial privilege and is a primary tool of racial domination.

This is important. When people say ‘I don’t care if someone is yellow, purple, pink or grey. Color doesn’t matter to me’ they are speaking from a place of privilege. Because ‘whiteness’ is socially viewed as a non-color, they can allow themselves to claim that they do not see color. The same is true for any majority, or privileged group, claiming they do not ‘see’ less privileged groups. 

Now, we can all sense where this is going. If you do not see discrimination and oppression – how can you counter it?  And more to the point, by claiming we are all ‘the same’ you are in effect claiming we operate on a level playing field where inequalities do not exist. This is not useful. Especially in the realm of human rights which is predicated on the understanding that some groups need to be protected from those who don’t see them.

All this to say, that those who are creating programs that claim to address ‘gender inequalities’ by virtue of using that term once or twice in their proposal should take a long hard look in the mirror. What do you see?

Keshet Bachan

Behind the scenes: writer’s view

The trouble with writing an annual report is that by the time one is published, you are busy working on the next. So here I am, September 2010, working on ideas for the 2011 report in order to produce a respectable outline for the report’s Advisory Panel that is meeting in Washington next week. But I am also trying to think about what to say to the press about the 2010 report on Cities and technology – called Digital and Urban Frontiers: Girls in a Changing Landscape. The problem is that I finished writing it in April and have done a million things since then.

 It doesn’t take long though: the main issues are clear enough – listen to girls, invest in girls, ensure that in these new and challenging spaces they are able to take up the opportunities offered in the same way that their brothers can. And I can tell some of the girls’ own stories. As the writer of the report – I don’t work for Plan but have been involved as a freelancer since the first report in 2007 -  I have the privilege of being able to listen to some girls myself.  Remembering them reminds me of what I want to tell the journalists – of Habiba, a 12 year old girl in Egypt who was severely disabled at birth, but with the most charming smile I have ever seen. I nearly missed talking to Habiba, because my interviews with mothers and their daughters in this poor suburb of Cairo had run over time and we needed to be somewhere else. But as we were saying our goodbyes I realised that her mother had probably been asked to bring her in specially to see me. So I knelt down next to her and held her hand while her mother told me her story – which you can read on page 53 of the report. Habiba smiled throughout.

 Or the girls in a community centre in a suburb of Alexandria. I was expecting to meet a few girls and talk to them about their experience of living in the city and what they thought of the internet and mobile phones. When I got there, the room was packed with mothers and daughters who had all clearly been waiting for some time. They were all keen to know why I was there, who I was. Was I married? Did I have any children? How old was I? Then it was my turn. I started by asking whether they had moved to the city from the village, and if so why. There was a flurry of hands and everyone started talking at once. It was clear that the girls were not afraid to speak out. They told me of projects linking up via the internet and email with girls in other cities. They told me how they had taught their mothers how to use a computer – in some cases this also involved teaching them to read first. They were proud of what they had achieved, and outspoken and opinionated and feisty. They would have held their own in any forum.

But perhaps the most moving experience, as you will see from my piece on page 70 of the report, was the visit to the street girls centre in Alexandria. I arrived with Plan staff and talked to the director of the centre and the chief social worker. I could see the girls in the back room but they were not ready to talk to me yet. Even when we finally went in and I was introduced they were silent. But they did start chatting in the end, and they had many ideas for those in power about how things should be changed to improve their situation. They were quick and insightful and at times even funny. But the glimpse I got into their young lives was one of neglect and abuse and little love. And of the prejudice they face from almost everyone – just because they are girls. It is experiences like this that make me proud to be part of the Because I am a Girl team and clear that the challenge we face in the struggle for gender equality is far from over.

Nikki Van Der Gaag

Girls Empowerment and the CGI

This week leaders, movers, shakers and international change makers came together in New-York for the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The conference aims to catalyze dialogue and galvanize action by encouraging members to share creative solutions to global problems and pledge large scale commitments to social causes.

If you have been following the sessions you will know that this year we had not one, but four panels dedicated to ‘girls empowerment’. In fact, the opening plenary session of the conference chaired by former president Bill Clinton was titled ‘Empowering Girls and Women’. We then had a chance to hear about ‘preparing girls for the world’, ‘Securing the health and safety of girls’ and ‘Girls from Education to Economic Empowerment’.

In the evening there was a dinner for the glitterati sponsored by Goldman Sachs titled ‘Investing in Women and Girls’. According to Nick Kristof, NY columnist and author of ‘Half the Sky’, it was ‘the hottest ticket in town’. 

So what did we hear in these sessions?

Well it is very telling that the words ‘gender equality’ weren’t used at all. What does that indicate to us? That the sessions weren’t focused on achieving an equal society for both men and women, girls and boys. The sessions were focused on (and we quote) ‘Adolescent girls, the most underutilized resources in the world today’. Although broadly speaking investment in girls’ potential and empowering them to access opportunities is a laudable aim, one which we the ‘girls report’ team are in favour of, we also feel that the Human Rights based arguments have been diluted and practically disappeared altogether from the scene.  Girls have the right to be invested in. Actually, so do boys. And this investment will lead to a fairer society which will benefit everyone because social equality fosters prosperity. And more importantly: investing in girls, gender equality for all, is not just a means to an end, it is an end in itself.  

Rosalind Eyben, convener of IDS’s Pathway of Empowerment Programme says it best with her post on Open Democracy ‘Making Women Work for Development – Again’.

Moreover, focusing exclusively on the ‘return on investing in a girl’ in essence adds another load to their already burdened lives. So girls are now asked not only to clean, fetch water and firewood, help cook and take care of the sick and elderly, they are now tasked with raising their entire communities out of poverty.

Although we are heartened by the increased attention and investment by the corporate sector in girls, we worry that by disconnecting the rights based arguments from these discussions we are letting duty bearers off the hook. Ultimately it is the states responsibility to provide girls with free, quality education. If we do not discuss investment in girls in the context of human right treaties, international law and convention obligations, what’s to ensure these investments in girls empowerment are sustainable and not a product of a passing fad?

We believe it is time to add an old sentiment to the new discussions on girl’s empowerment: girls rights, are human rights.

Keshet Bachan