Girl Power: A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi

How did girl-focused development planning become so widespread, both within the United Nations and in global policymaking? How did "neoliberal" capitalism become wedded to mainstream feminism through "girl power" development frameworks? These are the central questions addressed in the book, Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi (Chicago University Press, 2025), which will serve as the basis for this talk. In the 1980s and 1990s, members of a Pan-African NGO called the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) worked with staff at UNICEF to invent and popularize girl-focused development programming. Yet their alliance was anything but easy. Within the FEMNET-UNICEF network, ideas about girls and development were hotly contested. Some people promoted girl power as a way to demand top-down changes to the global economic system. Others used girl power to justify the existing economic order; they called for girls to pull themselves and their communities up by their proverbial bootstraps under enduring conditions of economic austerity. Across all formulations, African girls and their imagined status became the battlefield on which capacious fights about the causes and solutions to capitalism, poverty, inequality, and patriarchy were waged. The talk methodologically explores the need to trace not only which ideas and policy frameworks became adopted, but which ones were erased, forgotten, cast aside, or unadopted and why as girl power grew into a globally dominant set of development frameworks.

Speaker Bio: Sarah Bellows-Blakely is a lecturer and research group leader in Global History and Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her undergraduate and graduate training at Stanford University and Washington University in St. Louis. In 2017, she moved to Berlin, where she became a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humboldt University’s Institute for Asian and African Studies. She has been at Freie Universität since 2018, first as a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School for Global Intellectual History and, since last year, as the leader of her own research team. She teaches in the MA Program for Global History and supervises doctoral candidates in history and gender studies. Bellows-Blakely’s research sits at the intersections of African history,  gender studies, and intellectual history. Her publications have appeared in the American Historical Review, Gender & History, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for African History, among other places. Her monograph, Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development from Nairobi, was published this month with The University of Chicago Press.