Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyzes the logics of “global girls’ empowerment” in Ugandan NGOs, revealing them as biopolitical projects that smuggle in neocolonial assumptions about young women’s time, labor, and sexuality.

Paper long abstract:

In the past decade, efforts to control population growth in the global South have taken new face in the global movement to "empower" adolescent girls. Demographers and development experts alike have increasingly focused on early interventions into the female life course in order to delay and reduce pregnancies, interventions they project will help stem the costs of overpopulation and thereby stimulate macroeconomic growth. In Uganda, the world's "youngest" country with more than 78% of the population below the age of 30, population control is an ever-increasing concern. There, development practitioners conducting "girls' empowerment" interventions interpret this global focus on the adolescent girl through interventions that aim to delay the onset of a young woman's reproductive life by reforming her everyday temporality. In particular, Ugandan "girls' empowerment" practitioners seek to curb pregnancies by occupying girls' time with entrepreneurial labor. Officials voiced a fear that when young women remain "idle," they transact sex in order to earn money, or, more simply, because they are bored. These discourses and social practices, which circulate across transnational, national, and local scales, tie young women's everyday temporalities to promiscuity, population control, and to global developmentalist logics. This paper critically analyzes these logics, revealing them as biopolitical projects that smuggle in neocolonial assumptions about young women's time, labor, and sexuality.