ABSTRACT
The Nike Foundation launched the Girl Effect campaign in 2009 with a YouTube video generating awareness about the lack of educational opportunities for girls in the Global South. Though the project began with a five-part study highlighting the interlocking contributors to gendered intergenerational global poverty, the resulting press materials marketed the Girl Effect as a brand of philanthropic involvement in which small interventions in education alone would have the power to improve GDP for entire nations. Using transnational feminist critiques of development and Foucauldian concepts of governance and biopolitics, I argue that these corporate efforts to solve social problems serve as a means of neoliberal governance that affects the ways global communities conceptualize and develop avenues for women’s empowerment. Analyzing official online and social media pages, campaign videos, mobilization materials, and affiliated research studies, I argue that the Girl Effect campaign deflects attention from the complexities of gendered global poverty and instead directs attention toward individualized therapeutic acts of caregiving.
