African women/girls, poverty, and economic empowerment have been a major subject of scholarship on development in the Global South since the colonial period. Girl Power? A History of Girl-Focused Development in Nairobi is an important addition to this body of scholarship. It is a nuanced work of global and intellectual history that pieces together the story of how Girls in Development—a particular kind of girl-focused programming was created, shaped, disseminated and cemented into international norms through an uneasy alliance established in the 1980s between African Women’s Communication and Development Network (FEMNET), a Nairobi-based nongovernmental organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In the beginning, the two organizations had conflicting political frameworks for the girl-focused programming but over time they were streamlined into one and then cemented into international norms and popularized at the UN and globally. The book explores this process of streamlining the frameworks, and how girls became the locus of the fight between capitalism and decolonization, later becoming central to the spread of neoliberal feminism. Historian Sarah Bellows-Blakely argues that free-market feminism did not emerge and spread automatically at the end of Cold War. Neither was it created by the multinational corporations and neoliberal financial institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. Instead, it came out of the “repeated creation, erasure, and circulation of particular ideas concerning girls, poverty, the state, racism, and colonialism among members of a Pan-African women’s NGO and employees of a child-focused humanitarian agency at the United Nations” (7).

Using an agnotological approach, Bellows-Blakely elucidates how in the 1980s and 90s, officials at FEMNET and UNICEF operating in the context of perceived crisis of girl-child wellbeing, global economic downturn, and the resultant economic austerity measures through the structural adjustment programs (SAPs), turned to Girls in Development as a solution to the growing wealth gap and mortality rates in the Global South. UNICEF commissioned and FEMNET organized and reported research findings on the educational status of girls in Southern and East Africa that indicated that there was no strong evidence pointing to patriarchy or cultural practices as the reason for rising inequalities between boys and girls. As a matter of fact, in some countries girls fared better than boys in education. According to these reports, factors such as wars, colonial legacies, and the new post-Cold War economic order were primarily responsible for the creation and perpetuation of the rising rates of wealth inequalities (26–34). Yet, in UNICEF’s logic, she explains, global poverty rates could be reduced if girls were empowered and encouraged to participate fully in school. According to UNICEF, educated girls would be an economic investment because they would grow up to become adults who would promote economic development through their participation in the economy as workers, thereby combating economic and health inequalities without having to change the global economic order. Ironically, girls were expected to acquire this education amid fiscal austerity measures that ended the welfare state in the Global South. Essentially, Girls in Development became the means for the expansion of free-market feminism and for silencing calls for structural changes in the unjust global economic system. To shape and cement this logic, UNICEF engaged in systematic knowledge erasures, deletions, suppression, and silencing of FEMNET’s early research findings on Girls in Development while amplifying and disseminating unsubstantiated ideas about patriarchy and cultural practices as the reasons behind lack of education among African girls (35–38). The organization’s actions signaled its goal of promoting Western capitalistic interests at the expense of the Global South. FEMNET’s lack of financial independence and its overreliance on UNICEF for financial and logistical support during its early years made it susceptible to these manipulations.

Methodologically, Girl Power? uncovers the history of the girl-focused lobbying campaign using a robust array of sources. Principally, FEMNET’s archive in Nairobi, which includes its founding documents, meeting minutes, administrative records, newsletter documentation of major projects, and published and unpublished advocacy materials about girls and women, and development in Africa and globally—such as poetry, cartoons, and stories written by schoolgirls about girls’ relationships, poverty, the state, and patriarchy. Internally published histories of FEMNET, which includes interviews with the NGO’s heads and members from the 1980s and 1990s have also been employed. Other sources include the US Department of State, Kenyan government ministries, former colonial offices of the United Kingdom, online repositories and emails, newspapers, and books. Lastly, Bellows-Blakely conducted oral histories and informal conversations with people who were involved in the girl-focused lobbying campaign such as FEMNET, UNICEF, the Girl Child Network, and the Kenya offices of Plan International, amongst others. Together, these sources have enabled the author to fill the gaps otherwise left by the absence of materials from both the central UNICEF Archives in New York City and the regional and country offices in Nairobi, Kenya. Alternative archives such as published and unpublished reports written by UNICEF’s staff have also been invaluable in filling those gaps. These reports were preserved in institutions that worked alongside UNICEF, such as the World Health Organization and World Bank.

Girl Power? is a significant contribution because it fills a temporal gap in the history of girl-focused development. While most scholarships focus either on the colonial period or the early decades of the twenty-first century, this book is focused on the last two decades of the twentieth century—a period marked by the waning of the Cold War and the consequent rise of the United States as the lone superpower and the global expansion of its neoliberal capitalistic agenda through structural adjustment programs (SAPs). These SAPs mandated economic austerity measures by welfare states, which exacerbated poverty amongst girls and women in the Global South. The study also forces scholars to not just think about the ideas and policy frameworks that were popularized by the United Nations, but more importantly, those that were erased as Girls in Development became the dominant development framework in the 1980s–90s. One area that the book is silent on, that would help readers to understand better the position of the African women leaders of the NGOs, is their perspective following the UN Global Conferences on Women. Did they consider themselves equally culpable for continuing to work with UNICEF despite their engagement in the selective suppression and amplification of knowledge on Girls in Development? Or did they consider themselves victims of unequal global economic system that forced them into the uneasy alliance with UNICEF and consequently (wittingly or unwittingly) participated in the expansion and perpetuation of the unjust system?

The story of the creation and internationalization of Girls in Development as a girl-focused program is a complex story that, although based in Nairobi, involves multiple actors from various continents, countries, governments, non-governmental organizations, and diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, but Bellows-Blakely has masterfully woven together the various strands into a comprehensive work of global history. It is a study that will be appreciated by both scholars and activists alike.