Girl Power? A History of Girl‐Focused Development From Nairobi

What does it mean to place girls at the centre of international development? In Girl Power?, Sarah Bellows-Blakely offers a compelling and sharply argued account of how African girls became key figures in global development policy during the 1980s and 1990s. Far from a straightforward narrative of empowerment, the book traces how diverse and sometimes radical ideas about gender and justice were repeatedly narrowed into a single, neoliberal framework in which ‘girl power’ meant little more than integration into free-market capitalism. At the heart of the book is the fraught relationship between the African Women's Communication and Development Network (FEMNET), founded in Nairobi in the mid-1980s, and UNICEF. FEMNET's founders – drawn from across Africa, including Kenya, Egypt and Zambia – sought to decolonise international policymaking and to ensure African women represented themselves in global forums. By contrast, many UNICEF officials, particularly at headquarters in New York, worked within the assumption that neoliberal capitalism and structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) were inevitable. Tensions and alliances between these two organisations shaped international debates about girls’ education, poverty and empowerment in ways that had far-reaching consequences. Bellows-Blakely begins with a striking case study. In 1990, UNICEF commissioned FEMNET to oversee a study of girls’ education in East and Southern Africa. FEMNET coordinated fifteen African researchers across eight countries, producing findings that challenged dominant assumptions. Their data showed that gendered disparities in primary school access were relatively limited; instead, they emphasised the devastating effects of capitalism, colonial legacies and Christianity on girls’ lives. UNICEF's published version, however, erased this analysis. It recast African cultures and families as the primary barriers to girls’ education and reframed SAPs as beneficial. As Bellows-Blakely argues, such acts of selective revision were central to how neoliberal frameworks of girl-focused development took shape. The book traces this process to the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, where FEMNET and UNICEF successfully lobbied for a section on girls in the final report. Yet the outcome was far from what FEMNET's more radical members had envisaged. The Beijing documents emphasised girls as future drivers of economic growth if freed from ‘culturally rooted patriarchy’, rather than highlighting structural inequalities in the global economic order. This outcome marked the consolidation of what scholars have described as free-market feminism: an entrepreneurial model of women's empowerment that advanced integration into capitalism while sidelining redistribution and structural change. Bellows-Blakely makes clear that this narrowing was not automatic. Rather, it was the product of constant negotiations, frictions and erasures within and between FEMNET and UNICEF. She shows how cooperation, contestation and hierarchy were all integral to the making of global policy. Importantly, she insists that FEMNET and its members were not marginal actors: African women such as Eddah Gachukia and Njoki Wainaina were central to shaping international agendas, even as their political commitments were often distorted or erased. The book is based on extensive archival and oral history research across four countries. Bellows-Blakely draws on FEMNET's Nairobi archive, containing founding documents, newsletters, advocacy materials and an internally published organisational history. With UNICEF's archives largely inaccessible, she reconstructs its role through alternative sources, including from United Nations Educational Scientific Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), World Health Organisation (WHO) and World Bank collections, alongside interviews with staff and activists. Particularly valuable are her oral history interviews with women who experienced girl-focused interventions as children, which highlight the ongoing sensitivities around this history – many interviewees requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. Methodologically, Girl Power? is not a social history of African girls. Instead, it is a history of how girls were invoked by adults to justify particular visions of development, capitalism and gender relations. Bellows-Blakely argues that African girls became symbolic terrain on which broader debates about economic crisis, decolonisation and welfare retrenchment were fought. In doing so, she bridges two strands of existing scholarship: earlier studies of gendered development under colonial rule and more recent work on twenty-first-century corporate ‘empowerment’ campaigns. Her focus on the 1980s and 1990s illuminates how neoliberal ‘girls in development’ frameworks emerged out of, but were not identical to, earlier colonial developmentalism. Each chapter advances this argument through detailed case studies. Early chapters trace FEMNET's origins in the UN Decade for Women and the contested politics of the African Women's Task Force. Later chapters examine co-production of knowledge and erasure in specific projects, the narrowing of feminist visions at Beijing, and the consequences for non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Nairobi's Girl Child Network, which became increasingly dependent on multinational corporate funding in the late 1990s. The analysis demonstrates how feminist and decolonial critiques of capitalism were steadily displaced by programmes emphasising individual girls’ entrepreneurial potential and consumption needs – for instance, through campaigns linking empowerment to purchasing sanitary pads. The book's strengths are considerable. It restores African women activists to the centre of global intellectual and political history, challenging their marginalisation in accounts that treat them as absent, passive or resistant. It shows how power imbalances between African NGOs and international agencies shaped whose ideas were amplified and whose were erased. And it highlights the everyday bureaucratic practices – editing reports, writing donor documents, setting conference agendas – through which neoliberal feminism was consolidated. If there is a limitation, it is that the focus on policy and intellectual history sometimes leaves the reader wanting more on the lived experiences of African girls themselves. Bellows-Blakely is clear that this is not her aim, directing readers to the growing social history of African girlhood. Still, the absence is felt, and one wonders how a closer integration of policy history with girls’ own testimonies might further complicate the story. Overall, Girl Power? is an ambitious and important contribution. It demonstrates how histories of development must attend not only to what ideas emerged, but also to how alternative possibilities were actively suppressed. By foregrounding the intellectual labour of African women, it challenges assumptions about where global feminist ideas originate and how they circulate. In showing how ‘girl power’ became aligned with neoliberalism, Bellows-Blakely provides a critical history that resonates strongly in the present, when international campaigns continue to promise empowerment through markets while sidestepping structural inequalities.