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Literacy practices play a catalytic role in equipping girls with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to make qualitative improvements on their lives. This paper reports on a qualitative study that identified existing literacy practices and the support available to enable the development of literacies among girls. Interviews and observations were used to generate data from in and out-of-school-girls, teachers, the ward education officer, parents, and religious, traditional and village leaders. The study found that girls had access to a variety of print materials, and used print more than any other literacy materials. Similarly, the engagement with traditional literacy practices like poems, folklore, metaphors, music or rituals was not reported by the participants, which may simply suggest that they do not associate the traditional literacy practices with literacy learning. This implies further that many traditional ways of acquiring literacies, which were part of the cultural heritage and ways of learning language of older generations, are being forgotten and possibly slowly vanishing. To support girls' acquisition of literacies, it is essential to build the capacity of communities, parents, teachers, religious and local leaders who can help girls fully integrate all available literacy sources into their literacy learning.

This paper presents a public outreach program developed by the Department of Classics at the University of Florida to introduce school-age children to Classics. The main goal is to emphasise the value of Classics and the practical skills it teaches by engaging students with hands-on exercises and materialising connections between the past and the present. The paper focuses on the importance of Classics and the humanities in the development of engaged citizens, the types of programs and their content, and ways to ensure the sustainability of such initiatives through the involvement of graduate students, faculty, and administrators.

Background Adolescence is a pivotal stage of life, yet many adolescent girls in Pakistan face significant challenges due to gender inequality and limited opportunities for empowerment. To address these gaps, Rise Up and Girl Up introduced the 'Girls' Voices Curriculum': a 10-week program to empower underprivileged girls through girl-led advocacy and decision-making. Methods Piloted in three suburban schools in Sindh Province, Pakistan, the curriculum was evaluated for cultural acceptability and feasibility through workshops with 86 teachers and school administrators. Results The findings highlight its relevance, cultural sensitivity, and potential to address adolescent girls' needs. Ongoing efforts aim to integrate the curriculum into schools and evaluate its effectiveness in fostering gender equality, problem-solving, and leadership skills. Conclusion This initiative holds promise as a scalable model for empowering adolescent girls in Pakistan and similar contexts.

Background Previous studies have not synthesized existing literature on the lived experiences of pregnant and parenting adolescents (aged 10–19) in Africa. Such evidence synthesis is needed to inform policies, programs, and future research to improve the well-being of the millions of pregnant or parenting adolescents in the region. Our study fills this gap by reviewing the literature on pregnant and parenting adolescents in Africa. We mapped existing research in terms of their substantive focus, and geographical distribution. We synthesized these studies based on thematic focus and identified gaps for future research. Methods We used a three-step search strategy to find articles, theses, and technical reports reporting primary research published in English between January 2000 and June 2021 in PubMed, Jstor, AJOL, EBSCO Host, and Google Scholar. Three researchers screened all articles, including titles, abstracts, and full text, for eligibility. Relevant data were extracted using a template designed for the study. Overall, 116 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the study. Data were analyzed using descriptive and thematic analyses. Results Research on pregnant and parenting adolescents is limited in volume and skewed to a few countries, with two-fifths of papers focusing on South Africa (41.4%). Most of the studies were African-led (81.9%), received no funding (60.3%), adopted qualitative designs (58.6%), and were published between 2016 and 2021 (48.3%). The studies highlighted how pregnancy initiates a cycle of social exclusion of girls with grave implications for their physical and mental health and social and economic well-being. Only 4.3% of the studies described an intervention. None of these studies employed a robust research design (e.g., randomized controlled trial) to assess the intervention’s effectiveness. Adolescent mothers' experiences (26.7%) and their education (36.2%) were the most studied topics, while repeat pregnancy received the least research attention. Conclusion Research on issues affecting pregnant and parenting adolescents is still limited in scope and skewed geographically despite the large burden of adolescent childbearing in many African countries. While studies have documented how early pregnancy could result in girls' social and educational exclusion, few interventions to support pregnant and parenting adolescents exist. Further research to address these gaps is warranted.

In this article I consider the ethical boundaries of intergenerational activism for the feminist researcher conducting research in pre-existing activist networks. Drawing on a decade of involvement with girl-activists at the United Nations, I revisit key moments that challenged me to re-think the ethical, discursive, and relational conditions of girls’ political empowerment. Intergenerational activism creates relational messiness between adults and girls since effectively partnering with girls requires disruptions of generational power with practitioner-scholars learning to make it up as they go along. This article illustrates the complex and contested ways in which girls and adults build activist partnerships in adult-centered and sometimes politically hostile settings. In exploring the environment within which North American girls experience political (dis)empowerment, I question the ethics of empowering girls under current spectacular discursive conditions.

In this article, I analyze Koroleva Balu, hereafter referred to in English as The Queen of the Ball, a Ukrainian makeover TV show for schoolgirls that showcases girls' competition for the title of Queen during the preparation for their high school prom. A crew of professional stylists assists the participants, creating their personal styles. My focus is on an analysis of the concepts of girls' empowerment through feminine beauty and “femme-ing the normative.” I investigate how gender is constructed by the show as a performative act and how this process corresponds to post-socialist views of beauty and femininity.

CaShawn Thompson crafted Black Girls Are Magic as a proclamation of Black women's resilience in 2013. Less than five years later, it had been repurposed as a gateway to an attractive niche market. Branding Black Womanhood: Media Citizenship from Black Power to Black Girl Magic examines the commercial infrastructure that absorbed Thompson's mantra. While the terminology may have changed over the years, mainstream brands and mass media companies have consistently sought to acknowledge Black women's possession of a distinct magic or power when it suits their profit agendas. Beginning with the inception of the Essence brand in the late 1960s, Timeka N. Tounsel examines the individuals and institutions that have reconfigured Black women's empowerment as a business enterprise. Ultimately, these commercial gatekeepers have constructed an image economy that operates as both a sacred space for Black women and an easy hunting ground for their dollars.

The 'girl effect' - the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is the key to stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in the global South - has recently become a key development strategy of the World Bank, the imf, usaid and dfid, in partnership with corporations such as Nike and Goldman Sachs. This paper examines the logic of this discourse and its stance towards kinship in the global South, situating it within the broader rise of 'gender equality' and 'women's empowerment' as development objectives over the past two decades. Empowerment discourse, and the 'capability' approach on which it is based, has become popular because it taps into ideals of individual freedom that are central to the Western liberal tradition. But this project shifts attention away from more substantive drivers of poverty - structural adjustment, debt, tax evasion, labour exploitation, financial crisis, etc - as it casts blame for underdevelopment on local forms of personhood and kinship. As a result, women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for bootstrapping themselves out of poverty that is caused by external institutions - and often the very ones that purport to save them.

Women empowerment and economic development are closely related: in one direction, development alone can play a major role in driving down inequality between men and women; in the other direction, empowering women may benefit development. Does this imply that pushing just one of these two levers would set a virtuous circle in motion? This paper reviews the literature on both sides of the empowerment—development nexus, and argues that the interrelationships are probably too weak to be self-sustaining, and that continuous policy commitment to equality for its own sake may be needed to bring about equality between men and women.

This paper presents a poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist interrogation of the 'Girl Effect'. First coined by Nike inc, the 'Girl Effect' has become a key development discourse taken up by a wide range of governmental organisations, charities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). At its heart is the idea that 'girl power' is the best way to lift the developing world out of poverty. As well as a policy discourse, the Girl Effect entails an address to Western girls. Through a range of online and offline publicity campaigns, Western girls are invited to take up the cause of girls in the developing world and to lend their support through their use of social media, through fundraising and consumption. Drawing on a wide range of policy documents, media outputs and offline events, this paper explores the way in which the Girl Effect discourse articulates notions of girlhood, empowerment, development and the Global North/South divide. (Author abstract)