ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how children have become a central, if not the central, figure of (international) development, and girls the ideal subject of development. It analyses the role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in discursively constructing girls this way. In this construction interventions on gender violence are largely reduced to interventions on access to schooling on the assumption that the integration of girls into a particular kind of modernity will reduce gender-based violence and gender inequality more generally. INGOs and NGOs thereby construe issues of political struggle as technical problems amenable to expert intervention and programming.
