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Paper short abstract

Based on participatory research with girls and young women in Sierra Leone and Cameroon, this paper explores African feminist gender-transformative methods that centre girls’ voices. It examines mentorship and creative practice as tools for care, agency, and resisting polarisation.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on African feminist participatory action research with girls and young women involved in technical and vocational education and training in Sierra Leone and Cameroon. Based on the Upskilling for Future Generations (Gen-Up) project, it reflects on gender-transformative methodologies that foreground girls’ voices as central to both knowledge production and social change.

Rooted in African feminist traditions that emphasise lived experience, relationality, and collective care, the paper explores mentorship-based and arts-based participatory methods designed to counter extractive research practices. Through peer mentoring, youth-led research, photovoice, performative outreach, and collaborative reflection, girls and young women articulated everyday experiences of gendered constraint, economic precarity, and aspiration, while also shaping the direction of analysis and local advocacy.

Rather than treating participation as a technical method, the paper frames PAR as a gender-transformative praxis that redistributes authority, values embodied and situated knowledges, and builds solidarities among young women navigating intersecting gendered and colonial inequalities. It also reflects on ethical complexities, including power, care, emotional labour, and the long-term responsibilities attached to creative outputs. The paper argues that African feminist methodologies enable anthropology to become a space of encounter and care, capable not only of analysing polarisation but of actively working to unmake it through collaborative and justice-oriented practice.