Girls' Education in the Developing World

by

Karishma Desai, Olivia Casey, Asha Devi

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0318

Introduction

The education of girls in the Global South has been championed as a hopeful solution for unlocking economic and social transformation within international development discourse. Marginalized adolescent girls have been constructed in complex and contradictory ways—portrayed at once as imperiled and vulnerable, yet also aspirational and hopeful. This article sheds light on key literature that critically examines and importantly unsettles common framings and understandings of girlhoods and girls’ education. For instance, several scholars trace the imperial, colonial, and neoliberal tropes that proliferate throughout representations in girls’ education campaigns, past and present. A great deal of scholarship has traced the incredibly persistent framings of girls in crisis—as victims of cultural and sexual oppression and in need of external salvation through educative missions. On the other hand, feminist scholars have also cast a critical eye on commonsense representations of girls’ agency and empowerment, which often position privileged girls as empowered feminist saviors. Critical literature within the field illuminates how commonsense girls’ education ideals often flatten the peculiarities and unequal relations of power and difference that girls’ lives are situated within, depoliticizing calls for girls’ education. Meanwhile, recent philanthropic and corporate efforts to promote girls’ education are also increasingly framed in terms of neoliberal business and market rationalities that idealize girls’ economic potential as human capital investments. Responding to and resisting these challenging stereotypes, critical gender and education scholars demonstrate how particular ideas of educated girlhoods are deeply animated by particular desires and attachments informed by cultural, historical, and sociopolitical contexts. Collectively, these authors shed light on the nuances, ambiguities, and contradictions of girls’ lived experiences. Girls navigate their precarious and uncertain lives within and beyond schooling and contest and negotiate the overdetermined discourses that surround them. This article is organized thematically and covers both historical and contemporary scholarship surrounding girls’ education, informed by a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological perspectives. Drawing connections between girl crises past and present, this collection of scholarship brings light to the anxieties, concerns, and hopes placed in educating girl.

Edited Collections and Handbooks

As girls’ education has ascended on the agenda of international education stakeholders since the 1990s, numerous books and edited collections have been dedicated to interrogating the promises associated with educating young girls. The recommended edited collections and handbooks gather notable research and scholarship from a wide-ranging group of leading scholars in girls’ education. Stacki and Baily 2015 is an edited collection that consists of critical contributions from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches and reflects on strategies to overcome complex challenges surrounding girls’ education. This collection demonstrates the importance of conceptualizing challenges to girls’ education across multiple levels of scale—spanning from micro-interactions of gender enactments within schools and institutions to analyses of the impacts of broader macro forces such as structures of poverty. Sperling and Winthrop 2015 synthesizes a massive amount of the existing evidence on girls’ education, offering an accessible and comprehensive guide to the growing body of mainstream research aiming to demonstrate the presumed guarantees of girls’ education. Switzer, et al. 2024 traces the coalescing of “Girls in Development” (GID) as a distinctive, if often problematic, knowledge paradigm. In this collection, chapters from established and emerging scholars historicize and theorize GID, particularly as this paradigm relates to Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD) and related concepts such as empowerment, agency, and voice; offer visual and textual analyses of girlhood as a constructed category produced within transnational development fund-raising and awareness-raising campaigns; and present critical empirical studies of GID’s impact on girls’ lives and experiences as a part of specific global development processes (e.g., education, health, environmental sustainability) in Cambodia, Uganda, and Canada.

• Sperling, Gene B., and Rebecca Winthrop. 2015. What works in girls’ education: Evidence for the world’s best investment. New York: Brookings Institution.

  This book is designed as an accessible resource that gathers a massive amount of evidence on girls’ education. The authors argue that girls’ education offers the world’s best investment with multifaceted returns. At the same time, they present evidence to emphasize that a girls’ education crisis remains. To best address girls’ education, the text maps out needs and challenges anticipated over the coming decade.

• Stacki, Sandra L., and Supriya Baily. 2015. Educating adolescent girls around the globe: Challenges and opportunities. New York: Routledge.

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315770253

  This edited collection, which forms part of the Routledge Research in Education series, offers critical perspectives on research surrounding adolescent girls’ education through the lenses of multiple theoretical and methodological approaches. This book is organized into four sections: structural, institutional, psychological and social, and communal and cultural. The book presents a wide array of intersecting, complex challenges surrounding adolescent girls’ education and opportunities to overcome these challenges.

• Switzer, Heather, Karishma Desai, and Emily Bent. 2024. Girls in global development: Figurations of gendered power. New York City: Berghahn.

  This edited collection foregrounds the figure of the girl in development. Through theoretical and empirical chapters, authors identify the coalescing of “Girls in Development” (GID) as a distinctive, if often problematic, knowledge paradigm. The collection considers the impact and implications of GID in a variety of geopolitical locations, in different historical periods, and across disciplines through a critical feminist lens.