Empowering African Girls?

Abstract

Abstract In the 1980s and 1990s, actors from The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) created and internationalized frameworks for girl-focused economic policymaking. They successfully lobbied to include girl-centered programming in the 1995 UN World Conference on Women—the fourth and final event of its kind and one that cemented international norms for the linked UN movements for women’s rights and economic development. Yet this is not a tale of smooth circulation or easy alliances. Within the UNICEF-FEMNET network, ideas about girls and poverty were hotly contested; they did not couple seamlessly. As some frameworks internationalized, others disappeared. Combining histories of knowledge with intersectional and postcolonial methodologies shows how the creation of dominant policy frameworks has involved not only the diffusion of ideas but also their erasure. The article puts forth an alternative methodology that analyzes the interwoven processes of circulation and noncirculation, and of selective amplification and silencing, that have often driven the internationalization of knowledge and the writing of history.