In brief, through a series of interactive websites, links, memes and shortfilms, the
campaign suggests that by investing in girls in the Global South through educa-
tional and entrepreneurial schemes for consumers in the Global North, Southern
these girls will be economically empowered to save themselves and therefore their
communities from pandemics crises such as starvation and disease. The promo-
tional materials include statements like such as this:‘Girl Effect, noun: The unique
potential of 600 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the
world’(Koffman and Gill 2013 : 88). Invest in a girl, the initiative suggests, and
‘“she will do the rest’”, pulling herself, her family, her community and her country
out of poverty.
The Nike Foundation has been publically criticised as oversimplifying a com-
plex problem and shifting resources away from other approaches and from the
company’s own exploitative past labour practices. Feminist researchers suggest the
‘Girl Effect’campaign relies on essentialist views of womanhood, depict women
and girls in developing countries as“in need of saving”. The campaign plays into
stereotypes of women as natural caregivers and reinforced perceptions of‘women’s
work’and‘men’s work’, neglected crucial macro-economic issues, and prioritised
the well-being of the economy over the well-being of women (Switzer 2013 ). Thus
‘Girl Effect’combines the grammar of neo-liberalism, post feminism and the‘ed-
ucation as-development’imperative (Koffman and Gill 2013 ). Crucially, this type
of campaign does not take into consideration men, boys and masculinity, and the
relations of women and girls with their households and community often have the
effect of overburdening women who are already responsible for childcare and all
types of formal and informal labour. Girl’s bodies become the locus of economic
development as human capital investment in‘potential productivity’. Thus, we need
to ask the following: Does the campaign address structural inequality and power
imbalances? Does it focus on what girls can do for development, rather than what
development can do for girls?
Switzer ( 2013 ) specifically explores how education enters into the‘Girl Effect’
stories and the ways the idea of saving a nation through the human capital currently
wasted in girls and women (constituted as too sexually reproductive too soon, and
therefore as failed consumers) works in the campaign. The promotional materials
position adolescent girls into‘diametrically opposed’figures, those who have
access to schooling and therefore choice and autonomy (Global North) and those
who are confined to‘reproductive peril’(Global South). Promoting institutional
access to formal schooling for adolescent girls as a means for economic develop-
ment serves neo-liberal aims to predict female productive and reproductive capacity
by managing adolescent bodies and, thereby reifying postfeminist female excep-
tionalism as the singular‘solution’to global poverty. In so doing, the‘Girl Effect’
narrative participates in the production of feminist development‘fables’by pro-
moting a particular kind of (self)regulation—via formal schooling—of adolescent
female sexuality, fertility and social reproduction. Girls’bodies become the locus of
economic development as human capital investments in‘potential’productivity.
The‘Girl Effect’ campaign aims to draw in successful Western successful
consumer girls in as saviours of‘third world’girls (Koffman and Gill 2013 )—the
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