Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Foregrounding the voices of out-of-school adolescent girls in rural Zimbabwe, this paper exposes the limits of dominant development frameworks and shows how the Shona concept kuzviitira ('doing for oneself') embodies a relational and culturally grounded form of agency.

Paper long abstract

Dominant development discourses continue to frame girls’ empowerment through universalised, Eurocentric assumptions that equate formal schooling with agency, progress and moral worth. This paper offers a decolonial critique of these assumptions by centring the lived experiences of out-of-school adolescent girls in rural Zimbabwe. Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured narrative interviews and participant-led photography with six girls aged 17 to 18 enrolled in a donor-funded vocational education and training (VET) programme, the paper examines how girls articulate agency, value, and aspiration within conditions of structural constraint.

The analysis brings Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach into dialogue with decolonial African feminist thought to foreground indigenous, relational understandings of agency. A central finding is the significance of the Shona concept kuzviitira – “doing things for oneself” - which participants used to express aspirations for autonomy, self-reliance, dignity, and the capacity to care for oneself and others. While the girls valued formal schooling and recognise its social and symbolic importance, most did not wish to return to school. Instead, they framed vocational skills training as a more meaningful and attainable pathway for achieving kuzviitira within their social and economic realities.

By treating kuzviitira as a form of African women's philosophy rather than merely an empirical finding, the paper challenges deficit-based representations of ‘marginalised’ girls and exposes how dominant education and development frameworks marginalise indigenous epistemologies of agency. It contends that centring African women's everyday moral reasoning is key to decolonising development ethics and imagining futures beyond colonial legacies.