Adolescent Girls and Gender Justice Understanding Key Capability Domains Across a Variety of Socio-Cultural settings Lessons Learned and Emerging Issues from Year 1.

摘要

Poised at the intersection between childhood and the world of adults, adolescent girls face unique challenges to the full development and exercise of their capabilities. And yet they may also hold the key to effecting positive development outcomes that could reverberate across future generations. Investments in the empowerment of adolescent girls are increasingly recognised to be critical in breaking the inter-generational transmission of poverty. For such investments to have maximum impact, more evidence is needed to make adolescent girls more visible in policy and planning processes and to identify more precisely the multiple social and cultural forces that shape their experiences and conditions of life. A multi-year, multi-country study is exploring the complex ways in which adolescent girls’ capabilities are shaped and/or constrained by gender discriminatory social norms, at vulnerabilities. The study is being conducted by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in partnership with national research teams and has been commissioned by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as part of a flagship programme on Transforming the Lives of Girls and Young Women. The intended outcomes of the work programmer are: (1) to provide guidance on how to generate and use a broad evidence base to better inform national and international policies and programmed for vulnerable adolescent girls and young women; and (2) to contribute to an improved evidence base on understanding and tackling discriminatory social norms in order to support more effective policies and programmed for vulnerable adolescent girls and young women. This aims to promote the realisation of girls’ full capabilities and, eventually, gender justice. The conceptual framework for year 1 research was informed by the capabilities approach to development and underpinned by current thinking around gender justice and entitlements. The study investigated key capabilities in the following domains: education, household and family relations; economic empowerment/access to resources; physical safety and health; psychosocial well-being; and political/civic participation. As reflections on the findings of year 1 research have progressed, the conceptual framework has also evolved. The current framework (see Figure 1) illustrates how both the drivers of positive change in social norms and forces maintaining discriminatory gender norms may be mediated by a variety of factors, operating through a variety of institutions and sites to affect adolescent girls’ capability domains.