Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Moeller, Kathryn

Titel

Proving “The Girl Effect”: Corporate knowledge production and educational intervention

Ist Teil von

• International journal of educational development, 2013-11, Vol.33 (6), p.612-621

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •I examine corporate investment in girls’ education.•I consider how it shapes knowledge production and educational intervention in adolescent girls.•Girls’ free education becomes a means for proving a corporate theory of social change.•Monitoring and evaluating its theory affects the provision of girls’ education.•Investment in girls’ education enables the corporation to expand its relationship with powerful development institutions. The Nike Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Nike, Inc., seeks to prove the “The Girl Effect,” its theory of change, through investments in adolescent girls in the Global South. The foundation defines it as the “unique potential of 250 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world.” This article examines the elaborate, yet continually contested processes of attempting to prove “The Girl Effect.” It draws on ethnographic research in the U.S. and Brazil (2009–2010) to analyze how the Nike Foundation funds, produces, and distributes knowledge on the purported potential of particular adolescent girls to end poverty. It focuses on how the monitoring and evaluation practices of one grantee in Brazil were informed by and contributed to the foundation's broader project of proving “The Girl Effect.” The analysis explains how this occurred through processes of knowledge production and educational intervention that were predicated on an epistemological understanding of the trope of “Third World girl.” It provides insights into how the foundation extends it power and authority over new bodies, institutions, and geographies by asserting itself as an expert on adolescent girls and by influencing the development agendas of more powerful global institutions.