“Girls Can't Do This Alone”

Much work has been done in Girlhood Studies in recent years to expand our understanding of girls’ participation in politics and to conceptualise girls as active subjects, shaping their communities and lives for the better. However, much of this work remains focused on the Global North. Drawing on data from Plan International’s Real Choices, Real Lives qualitative, longitudinal study, we explore examples of how girls actively negotiate growing up as girls in Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, the Philippines, Togo, Uganda and Vietnam. By analysing the data both across contexts and through time, we demonstrate how girls reject dominant, instrumentalist discourses in international development that see them as responsible for managing their bodies, working hard to support their families and communities and even solving gender inequalities. Instead, we argue, they call on parents, teachers and authorities to make societies fairer and safer for girls. We conclude that these girls’ voices serve to challenge development discourses and programming whose focus falls all too frequently on “fixing” girls, rather than addressing the many dangers and obstacles they face.