University of Chicago doctoral candidate Erin Moore, supervised by Dr. Jennifer Cole, will investigate the circulation, uptake, and transformation of global "girls' empowerment" discourses, resources, and practices. She will do so in order to shed light on how the personnel of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) carry ideas related to gender and development back and forth between international human rights arenas, on the one hand, and Ugandan families, on the other. This project asks: How do the participants of girls' empowerment programs take up and renegotiate their messages? What are some of the effects and unintended consequences for social reproduction in the families and communities in which these programs intervene?
To answer these questions, Moore will conduct twelve months of ethnographic study with girls' empowerment NGO personnel, participants, and their families in Kampala, Uganda. The research will utilize social science methods, including domestic participant observations, interviews, focus groups, and analyses of mass-mediated girls' empowerment campaigns.
Findings from this research will contribute to a social scientific understanding of gender, adolescence, and economic development. This project will also inform policymakers, assist international development workers, and contribute to the training of a graduate student.
In 1992, Lawrence Summers, then the chief economist of the World Bank, declared that educating girls "yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world." Summers’ argument converged with a growing consensus in the international development industry, which over the past two decades has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into transnational campaigns designed to "empower" girls – psychologically (via self-esteem), personally (via leadership training), and economically (via microloans). My dissertation investigates the production, circulation, uptake, and transformation of global "girls’ empowerment" discourses in order to better understand how ideologies related to development, age, and gender attract resources and public support in some parts of the world and are then translated in others. This research project draws upon ethnographic research with young women in the Bwaise "slum" area of Kampala who approach myriad institutions including religious groups, NGOs, and the sexual economy to acquire the resources they need to attend school, support their families, or migrate. This research focuses on Uganda, its contemporary moral panics over "sugar daddies," and the young women who, it is presumed, transact affection for money and gifts. This section will show how these current crises over young women’s morality are embedded in a deeper historical convergence of patriarchal Ganda cultural practices such as bridewealth and body modifications and colonialism. By drawing on interviews with Baganda men and women as well as on archival materials on the history of missionary girls’ education, I will show, in contravention to globally circulating discourses about a pernicious devaluation of girls in the global South, how young women have long held great value (in Luganda they are "sugar") – and produced great anxiety – in Buganda. This project also illuminates the context in which young women find themselves approaching myriad institutions for resources, how the international aims for girls’ empowerment end up appearing as gendered self-shaming, and how young women’s everyday practices may actually be anticipating and circumventing the globally and locally discourses that circulate around them. In addition to its contributions to the anthropology of international development, my research will impact international policymaking by providing a robust qualitative data set against which the quantitative outcomes of adolescent girl-specific development interventions can be compared and contrasted. Most of the existing research produced about young women involved in development programming is quantitative; it is related to loan repayment, school enrollment, and pregnancy rates. Yet without a specific understanding of the local context, these studies do not take into account what it might mean for girls to become "empowered." By elucidating how and in what ways young women position themselves to appear as the appropriate recipients of NGO resources, my research will highlight the unintended effects for the implementation of these programs in communities. While my research focuses on young women in urban Uganda, its results will speak to the effects of development interventions in the global South in general. Results from this study will be made available to the NGOs, government ministries, and universities encountered over the course of my investigation.
