“Investing in the Girl Effect”: A Critical Analysis of Transnational Corporate Investment in Adolescent Girls’ Education

• In Event: Gendered Identities, Gender Differences, and Agency in Straight Spaces

Abstract

This paper examines how transnational corporations and their foundations are investing in adolescent girls in the global South as a new “untapped” global resource for development. Drawing on two years of multi-sited, ethnographic research in diverse sites in the U.S. and Brazil, the paper focuses on how these philanthropic investments in education are produced across different institutional and geographical contexts and examines how actors across social, economic, institutional, and geographic locations are negotiating these corporate practices in education. Through its analysis, the paper illuminates the possibilities, constraints, and implications of this emerging phenomenon in girls’ education.

Author

• Kathryn Jane Moeller, University of California - Berkeley