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Session Submission Summary

From surviving to thriving: Participatory research with and for girls’ agency in marginalized communities across Africa and Asia

Sat, March 28, 11:15am to 12:30pm, Hilton, Floor: Ballroom Level - Tower 2, Franciscan C

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel explores how participatory, girl-centered research across five countries advances understanding of girls’ agency in marginalized communities, illuminating the potential of engaging adolescent girls as co-creators of knowledge and agents of change in community-driven systemic change for more equitable, inclusive, and peace-centered education in an increasingly divided society.

Young people today are confronted with complex challenges while also grappling with injustices such as gender-based violence, discrimination, economic inequality, ableism, and racism (Barford, 2023; UN, 2018). These issues create an increasingly urgent reality for girls worldwide as they navigate multiple and intersecting layers of social, economic, political, environmental and cultural exclusion and educational inequality. Participatory research with girls in marginalized communities highlights the urgent need for long-term, collective, and coordinated strategies that engage girls’ agency to address the root drivers of oppression and inequality, transform social norms and power structures, and strengthen girls’ ability to dream, drive, and decide in their own lives, schools, and communities. Agency is central to equal participation, emotional well-being, and positive outcomes across education, work, relationships, and broader life opportunities (Friedrich et al., 2021; Richardson et al., 2019; Schoon et al., 2021). In addition, agency can be a generative force that shifts us from merely reacting to circumstances toward actively shaping new possibilities (Sulkunen, 2012).

This panel draws on research from the Learning and Action Alliance for Girls’ Agency (LAAGA), a community of practice composed of 25 leaders in gender and education working in 15 countries across Africa, America, Asia, and the Middle East in collaboration with the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.

Recognizing the limitations of much of the past research on girls’ agency (O’Donoghue, 2025) and the urgent need for approaches that center girls’ lived realities, LAAGA made a deliberate decision to focus on adolescent girls in marginalized contexts and challenge the notion that all girls experience exclusion (or agency) in the same way. Exploring agency through a lens of marginalization urged LAAGA as a collective to ask: which girls, where, in what ways, under what conditions, and why? And perhaps most relevant for research design: how do we know?

The 25 members of LAAGA bring deep experience, expertise, and engagement with critical and transformative research paradigms. As a collective informed by decolonial, feminist, participatory, and community-driven research approaches, LAAGA has embarked on an exploratory journey of researching “with, for, and about agency” in diverse contexts across the globe.

Between 2023 and 2025, members of LAAGA conducted research with 400 girls and 500 community members across five countries in Africa and Asia. LAAGA researchers across all settings were guided by a shared, iterative, participatory, and qualitative girl-centered methodology, developed collectively within the LAAGA network. LAAGA’s mosaic approach (Clark & Moss, 2011; Jara-Osorio, 2024), weaves together multiple methods to more effectively position girls as active co-creators and capture the diversity of their lived experiences.

The findings from this research underscore that agency is multidimensional, dynamic, and deeply shaped by context. For the girls involved, agency was practiced and expressed rather than granted or owned; it was influenced by their motivations, skills, and knowledge, as well as by relationships and situational dynamics within specific settings. Broader systems, including policies, practices, resources, power relations, and mindsets, either enabled or restricted adolescent girls’ aspirations and their ability to act. Research highlights that supporting girls’ agency requires both tackling systemic barriers and leveraging opportunities through collaboration at local and global levels.

Together, the four papers in this panel reveal patterns and divergences in how agency is understood and practiced, highlighting strategies that transcend borders while respecting local contexts. The discussion will identify pathways for deepening and expanding girl-centered approaches in education, policy, and development research and program development worldwide.

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