Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper shares stories written by adolescent girls enrolled on a Non-Formal Education programme in Zimbabwe. It reflects on storytelling as an epistemologically distinct complement to conventional impact evaluations, centring individuals not interventions and helping to reconsider accountability.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on a longitudinal impact study of a Non-Formal Education (NFE) programme for adolescent girls in Zimbabwe. The study centred storytelling approaches, and between 2018-2025 a group of girls enrolled on the programme attended week-long workshops where they were supported to develop stories about key moments in their lives at that point. The stories were collectively analysed by the girls and the research team using capability theories. The study was designed to complement the large-scale external evaluation and ensure the programme’s evolution was accountable to adolescents’ perspectives. To the programme developers’ surprise and initial disappointment, however, the NFE programme only featured in some of the stories.

This paper explores the absence or de-centring of the programme. Rather than represent a failure of impact, it illustrates how storytelling, as an epistemologically distinct research approach, can support a more radical, youth-led approach to accountability in development: the storytellers, not the intervention, were the ‘main character’. By not artificially centring the intervention in their lives (as more conventional impact evaluations might) the stories provided rich insights into when and why the programme was valued by them (or not). The stories show how impact was dependent on different negotiations of power and agency in the girls’ lives, which led to changes in the programme.

Finally, the intersection of longitudinal, epistemological and ethical features in the study design enabled critical understandings of girls’ perspectives on their dual role in relation to the intervention and its evolution, and our own accountability as researchers.