Creating the ‘Girl Effect’: Including boys and men to promote girls’ land and asset ownership

Abstract

Empowering women and girls to gain access to resources is necessary to close the gender asset gap and reduce poverty. I bring together how the gender and development (GAD) approach conceptualizes the inclusion of men and boys in development programming with an analysis of a ‘Girl Effect’ intervention seeking to empower adolescent girls through land. This analysis adds to scholarship on the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ campaign and reveals the structural, gendered relations of power that girls must contend with and how such empowerment includes boys and men. Modes of their inclusion indicate that the ‘Girl Effect’ has not always overcome previous GAD critiques.

Keywords

Empowerment gender inheritance India land rights monitoring and evaluation

I Introduction

Improving the position of women and creating equitable gender relations have long been goals for many donors, civil society organizations and governments (Chant, 2000; Chant and Gutmann, 2002; Connell, 2005; Cornwall, 2016). Increasing women’s productive or economic assets is a way to improve their position and can help reduce poverty (Doss et al., 2012; Johnson et al., 2016). A growing number of scholarly articles argue that a woman’s secure access to land may yield a number of positive benefits for her and her family, including reducing a woman’s social and economic vulnerability within her family before and after marriage (Agarwal, 2003; Deere and Leon, 2001; Friedemann-Sanchez, 2006; Johnson et al., 2016; Kelkar, 2014). For women who live in rural areas and who depend on natural resource-based incomes, assets such as land or a house are thought to be more useful than income alone, as assets enable women to leverage other resources such as credit or agriculture extension services (Johnson et al., 2016).

With an asset such as land, a woman’s vulnerability may be reduced. She will be less dependent on her husband or other family members. With land, she can earn an income. In communities that practise patrilocality (when a woman leaves her natal household after marriage and moves into her husband/in-law’s home), land and assets are assumed to create a ‘fall-back’ position and increase her bargaining power. With means to earn an income, a land-owning woman might be able to leave a violent marriage or threaten to do so. Friedemann-Sanchez (2006) shows how Colombian women with an income, land and houses titled in their own names used these assets to either force or threaten to force a violent husband out of the home. While highly sensitive to context, studies from around the world show that land and property ownership can reduce marital and domestic violence against women (Chowdhry, 2012; Hillard et al., 2016; Panda and Agarwal, 2005).

Given these benefits, closing the gender asset gap or the difference in men’s and women’s ownership of a given asset (Doss et al., 2012) is a priority for many women’s rights organizations. Closing the gap between men’s and women’s asset ownership entails understanding the structures of power that produce and sustain this gap, relevant both to the gender and development (GAD) scholarship and international development practice.

This article analyses an adolescent girl empowerment project funded by the Nike Foundation under its ‘Girl Effect’ campaign. The project implemented in West Bengal, India by the US-based non-profit, Landesa, seeks to improve girls’ access to land and asset ownership, to keep girls in school, and to reduce child marriage. Landesa’s Security for Girls through Land (SGL) project uses facilitated discussions and lectures to raise awareness among adults and children about the importance of girls’ education and delaying marriage as well as the factors that prevent women and girls from inheriting land and creating other types of economic assets. While young unmarried girls are the project’s primary target group, boys and adult men and women are exposed to the project’s messages and participate in activities so that they might support a girl in her goal to create an asset or stake her claim to a share in family land. Sections II and III of this article provide a brief background to and critique of both GAD and the ‘Girl Effect’ with a focus on the inclusion of men and boys before moving onto a case study of this ‘Girl Effect’ project in practice (Section IV). Section V discusses the extent to which this ‘Girl Effect’ project uses a GAD approach and considers, where necessary, how the ‘Girl Effect’ might approach gender differently.

II Gender and development (GAD) including men and boys

The GAD approach intended to move from the isolationist approach to women, the impression that women and men have different interests, and the construction of women as victims, which undergirded Women in Development (WID) approaches of the 1970s to the consideration of women and gender as relational (Tripathy, 2010). A GAD approach seeks to understand how gender roles and relations are mutually constituted through interactions between men and women in time (history) and place (context) and confront and transform unjust and unequal power relations in society and the ‘structural basis of gender inequalities’ (Cornwall, 2000; Cornwall, 2016: 344; Tripathy, 2010). In seeking such structural change, a GAD approach would enable men and women to build a critical consciousness about how power works in their own lives and create alliances and solidarities for social change (Bojin, 2013; Cornwall, 2016). Such an approach views empowerment as a process moving beyond women-only approaches to include men and boys in its programming in order to emphasize ‘the importance of achieving transformations in gender roles and relations’ (Chant, 2016b: 320).

GAD in practice faces criticisms. First, access to assets and opportunity structures has replaced attention on consciousness raising and the relational nature of empowerment (Cornwall, 2016). Second, GAD practice continues to present WID-like homogenized representations of women and men and fails to understand the diversity of women’s and men’s experiences. Men for the most part remain oppressors and obstacles to women’s rights. Women are victims or heroines who can save themselves (Cornwall and Anyidoho, 2010). Gender relations too tend to focus on oppressive relationships rather than on interdependencies between men and women (Cornwall, 2000). Such perceptions influence the extent to which men and boys participate in gender work and what forms their participation takes.

III The ‘Girl Effect’

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, international financial institutions and corporations took on the language of GAD through a ‘smart economics’ mantra purporting that ‘gender inequality is bad for business’ (Chant, 2016b: 316). The Nike Foundation launched the ‘Girl Effect’ in 2008.¹ The ‘Girl Effect’ is a media campaign claiming that ‘adolescent girls are the world’s greatest untapped solution to eradicate poverty’ (Chant, 2016b: 315). Before the adolescent girl can save the world from poverty though, she must stay in school and avoid early marriage, adolescent motherhood and its often-negative health complications, and prostitution as a source of income to support her family (Calkin, 2015; Switzer, 2013). The assumed latent/untapped economic potential of this adolescent girl, a Third World Girl, makes her a worthy and ‘smart’ object for international donor and corporate investment (Calkin, 2015; Switzer, 2013).

Formal education and the global labour market are central to producing the ‘Girl Effect’. Empowered with an education, rather than marrying early and having children before ‘she is ready’ (Girl Effect, 2010), she will enter the workforce and invest her earnings in her family and community, raising them out of poverty. As the adolescent girl is assumed to be economically responsible and altruistic, this investment cycle will reproduce itself across time. The educated woman herself will raise her own children the same way (Caron and Margolin, 2015). The ‘Girl Effect’ extends the logic of ‘smart economics’. Investing in the adolescent girl is even ‘smarter’, as catching her upstream as a girl gives her more time to learn to take care of herself and her family (Chant, 2016b) and unleash her inner entrepreneur.

Scholars have critiqued the logic of the ‘Girl Effect’ on many fronts. First, for the focus and subsequent pressure placed upon the individual girl to solve poverty (Chant and Sweetman, 2012; Grosser and van der Gaag, 2013). Second, for its naïve view of the social and structural realities of girls’ lives (Chant, 2016a, 2016b; Cobbett, 2014; Moeller, 2014), specifically that the individual girl has the capacity to change socially entrenched relationships of power and authority, as well as the societal institutions, that sustain and reproduce poverty and female subordination (Bent, 2013; Switzer, 2013). Third, for its instrumentalist view of girls, reducing their value to the income they generate (Caron and Margolin, 2015; Chant, 2016b). Fourth, for representing girls as victims and heroines (Bent, 2013; Caron and Margolin, 2015; Grosser and van der Gaag, 2013). Fifth, for representing adolescent girl accomplishment as individual achievement realized through the marketplace and making the ‘right’ decision about how to use her time, education and assets (Bent, 2013; Chant, 2016b). Sixth, for the absence of men and boys and the roles that they play in a girl’s life. Given the absence of men and boys, Chant questions the extent to which the ‘Girl Effect’ can produce the gender transformation needed to change gender inequitable relations (2016b: 316). Finally, the Girl Effect presents girls as a homogenous and cohesive social group.

Such ‘Girl Effect’ critiques are based on a discursive analysis of the words, images and stories told in Nike Foundation ‘Girl Effect’ videos² (Bent, 2013, Caron and Margolin, 2015; Calkin, 2015; Switzer, 2013). With the exception of Kathryn Moeller’s work in Brazil, there is little empirical work on the ‘Girl Effect’ in practice. This article adds an empirical complement to such critiques through an analysis of a ‘Girl Effect’ intervention in India and seeks to address three questions:

To what extent does the analysis of a ‘Girl Effect’ intervention extend the GAD approach to working with men and boys?

What does the analysis of a ‘Girl Effect’ intervention illuminate about the relationship between ‘Girl Effect’ discourse and practice?

How might insights from the GAD literature strengthen future ‘Girl Effect’ or other interventions seeking to improve girl’s access to resources?

IV Empowering girls: Landesa’s Security for Girls’ through Land (SGL) project

In 2010, the Nike Foundation awarded Landesa, a US-based international non-governmental organization, a four-year grant to design and implement a ‘Girl Effect’ intervention (Landesa, 2013a, 2013b, 2014). Landesa’s mission is ‘to secure land rights for the world’s poorest mostly rural women and men to provide opportunity and promote social justice’.³ Given its land rights agenda, Landesa named its project The Security for Girls through Land (SGL) project. I worked at Landesa between 2009 and 2012, and on the SGL project between 2010 and 2013 (first, as a full-time employee and later as a consultant). Due to contractual obligations, the data I use in this analysis are from publicly available sources though my knowledge of the project informs how I approached my analysis. I reviewed Landesa-authored monitoring reports and conference papers, blogs and policy briefs posted on its website, and a short documentary film produced about the project. Quotes from project beneficiaries come from these secondary sources and not primary interview data.⁴

Landesa has worked in India for more than two decades and implemented the SGL project in partnership with Government of India’s (GoI) Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls (SABLA) and the state of West Bengal’s Department of Women and Child Development and Social Welfare. Such partnerships helped increase the project’s reach and the likelihood that it might continue when ‘Girl Effect’ funding ended. Next, I explain how this land rights project incorporated the ‘Girl Effect’. I describe what SGL project participants (including men and boys) do and the project’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework. Thereafter, I use GAD insights to analyse the extent to which this ‘Girl Effect’ project extends them and suggest ways that a land rights project might address gender differently.

1 Project logic: Education or marriage? Land and assets or dowry?

The SGL project worked with three distinct groups in West Bengal’s Coochbehar district: (1) girls participating in SABLA programming, (2) their brothers and other boys in the area and (3) these children’s parents, other adults and community leaders (Landesa, 2013b). The project linked dowry to a number of social problems in the project area: (1) the inability of girls to control income, (2) the inability of girls to create other assets, (3) the inability of girls to inherit land and ‘Girl Effect’ concerns about (4) early marriage and (5) girls leaving school. According to the project logic (Landesa, 2013a, 2013b), the factors that make girls vulnerable to early marriage and an early end to her education are (1) the payment of dowry to secure her marriage, (2) beliefs and regulations that prohibit girls from holding or creating assets in their own name and (3) girls’ not exercising their legal rights to inherit land.

There are two main reasons why parents may not support a daughter inheriting a share of the family land: dowry and the appropriateness of land as a wedding gift. First, dowry (cash, consumer durables or both) is given to a bridegroom’s parents, a payment to secure a suitable husband. While dowry has been illegal since 1961 (Government of India [GoI], 1961), the practice is widespread. Maertens and Chari (2012) claim that dowry is paid in about 93 per cent of all Indian marriages. Second, parents may argue that a girl does not need a plot of land because she received dowry instead. Mothers may not support their daughters inheriting land, fearing that in-laws would be wary of a daughter-in-law who brought land into a marriage rather than the more traditional forms of women’s property such as jewellery, clothing or utensils (Gouthami and Rajgor, 2008).

There are three main reasons why daughters may not ask for their share of parents’ land. First, given that land is a primary source of wealth, daughters may not wish to take more wealth (other than dowry) from their families and potentially disadvantage their brothers’ ability to provide for their future families (Giovarelli, 2009; Kelkar, 2014). Second, asking for land might strain a girl’s relationship with her brothers and parents, putting any economic or social support they might provide to her in jeopardy should she need to return home after marriage (Oxfam and Landesa, 2013). Third, providing dowry at marriage often serves as a reason to exclude daughters from inheriting land with the claim that daughters receive dowry instead of land. The dowry-receiving daughter often believes that she should not ask for her share of the family land because she received dowry (Sircar and Pal, 2014). These reasons maintain the gender asset gap in land. Implementation of the Hindu Succession Act Amendment (HSAA) 2005 could close this gap.

2 Land inheritance law

Until recently, an Indian woman’s share of inheritable property such as land has been less than men’s (Halder and Jaishankar, 2008–2009). Equating male honour with land ownership and authority re-enforces male control over land and property (Wadley, 2002). Gendered roles and responsibilities influence land access and inheritance. Sons, in addition to supporting their own family, take care of parents as they age. Therefore, it is argued, sons need land much more than daughters (Da Costa, 2008). Passing land from father to son keeps wealth within the family and allows men to accumulate wealth.

For Hindus, land inheritance follows the practice of coparcenary with each male heir (usually sons) receiving an equal share of their father’s land. The passing of the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 prohibited privileging male heirs, stipulating that under Hindu personal law, both sons and daughters were legally entitled to inherit family land. The passing of the HSAA in 2005 expanded a girl’s entitlement, establishing that she is legally entitled to a share of land that is the same size as her brother’s, thereby making a daughter a coparcener in her own right (Government of India [GoI], 2005: 2–3). Women may reject their right to equal inheritance either voluntarily or under pressure from others. If a person wants to strip a woman of her rights, s/he may pressure her to sign a legal document called the ‘No Objection Certificate’ (NOC). In signing the NOC, a woman relinquishes her rights to inherit, citing no objection to other family members inheriting her share, allowing her brothers to inherit it all (Chandran, 2016).

Access to land exists in a trade-off with dowry and is informed by notions about whether or not women need land, especially after marriage when women are considered their husbands’ responsibility. The relational nature of land inheritance, men’s decision-making power in land matters, and connections between land and masculine forms of honour show how land relations are gendered and reinforce the perception of land ownership as a male entitlement. To change land inheritance practices, and give girls greater access to land, men and boys are essential to creating this ‘Girl Effect’.

What SGL project participants do: A curriculum for girls (Girls’ Groups): The SGL project introduced new knowledge and skills into the government’s pre-existing SABLA curriculum. Girls between the ages of 11 and 18 years were provided with ‘gardening skills, nutritional information and information about their right to one day own land.’⁵ Girls received land-based income generating skills in kitchen gardening coupled with training about what an asset is, and ways to invest income earned from gardening to create an asset. They learned about women’s legal rights to land, the equal inheritance law (e.g., HSSA), and visited government offices to learn about land registration (Landesa, 2013a). Most girls met twice a month in a group meeting (Landesa, 2013a: 19). In these small groups, they discussed the illegal nature of dowry and how its payment makes girls vulnerable to early marriage, disrupting their education. Finally, girls participated in confidence and assertiveness building training sessions (Landesa, 2013a; Mylan, 2014).

3 A curriculum for boys (Boys’ Groups)

Adolescent boys were organized into single-sex ‘Boys’ Groups’, to ‘sensitize’ them ‘to girls’ vulnerabilities and rights and the benefits of … land’ ownership (Landesa, 2014: 2). Each group received ‘two rounds (my emphasis) of sensitizing activities’ (Landesa, 2013a: 21). Boys received the same legal literacy information as girls and learned how dowry makes girls vulnerable to early marriage, limits their education and can prevent girls from inheriting land. Boys learn about the benefits of land to women (including the fall-back position after marriage) and are exposed to the unpaid, domestic care work that women and girls do at home by learning how to prepare and cook a meal over a fire. Boys staged plays acting out and working through project themes on inheritance or early marriage (Halder, 2014). Proponents claim that experiences such as exposure to women’s domestic work and to the factors that make girls vulnerable to discrimination will change boys’ minds with respect to how they perceive and value women and girls, ‘creating an environment in which girls’ economic and social empowerment can take root and endure’.⁶

4 Community engagement: Community conversations and community action planning

At the community level, men and women (many of whose children were SGL participants) attended awareness-raising workshops where they learned about land and inheritance law and discussed dowry and marriage practices, and the need for girls to have land and assets in her own name. Together men and women discussed the social norms and economic factors that promote early marriage and ways that the community might address them, thereby helping to ‘shape community norms about appropriate age of marriage’ (India’s legal marriage age, 18 years for girls and 21 years for a boy; Landesa, 2013a: 8).

Community members attended public performances of plays and puppet shows where puppets and actors acted out real-life scenarios based on project themes (Halder, 2014; Landesa, 2013a). These interactive performances allowed audience members to take the stage and act out roles within the family (Landesa, 2013a). Finally, based on the vulnerabilities that community group members identified as facing their girls, each community group developed an action plan including steps that they pledged to take to reduce these vulnerabilities over the coming year. Pledged actions included, but were not limited to (1) not marrying sons to girls who have yet to turn 18 years of age, (2) not marrying a daughter until she is 18 years old, (3) helping a daughter to create economic assets and (4) a commitment to continue group meetings for another year (Landesa, 2013a). Like the Boys’ Groups, discussions were the starting point for changing minds, while the action plan was a commitment to changing particular behaviours for at least one year.

5 The project’s M&E framework

To test whether or not these activities created the ‘Girl Effect’, Landesa staff used an impact evaluation methodology,⁷ complemented with qualitative data gathered through open-ended interviews, focus group discussions and participant diaries (Landesa, 2013b: 3; Mitchell and Caron, 2011). Landesa monitored both ‘Girl Effect’ universal indicators such as girls’ school enrolment and marriage age (Moeller, 2013) and unique, project-specific indicators. SGL project-specific indicators included evidence of asset creation and land inheritance and dowry payments. Self-reported interim evaluation results found that ‘participating girls were 15% more likely than girls in control areas to have financial assets in their name’ (Landesa, 2013b: 9). As a girl does not control dowry and dowry can lead to early marriage, the project encourages parents to lower ‘the cash amount of dowry…redirecting resources toward asset creation’, perhaps create a savings account in a daughter’s name or give dowry money directly to a daughter and not to future in-laws (Landesa, 2013b: 9).

Based on what girls’ parents stated that they thought they might pay for a future daughter’s marriage, the interim evaluation found that parents indicated that they expected to pay ‘an average of 2,770 rupees less in cash dowry to the groom’s family’ (Landesa, 2013b: 4). Self-reported data also showed parents of participating girls slightly ‘more likely to make a bequest directly to the girl at the time of marriage’ (Landesa, 2013b: 4). Finally, with respect to changes in land inheritance, ‘parents of more than 60% of participating girls said (my emphasis) that their daughters would inherit land from them’ (Landesa, 2013b: 12), a data point that when included in further statistical analysis indicates that ‘participating girls are 24% more likely than girls in a control group to inherit land’ (Landesa, 2013b: 12). Statistical measures of future intention are both meaningless, as they act as ‘simple windows on complex realities’ (Kabeer, 1999: 447; see note 4) and they strip away the relational dimensions of land relations (Cornwall, 2016).

Boys who participated in qualitative interviews tended to criticize the practise of dowry, but also found the discussion of dowry so ‘provocative’ that they went to their school library to conduct more research about it (Mitchell and Caron, 2011: 8). Boys though ‘were mixed on whether they would accept dowry’ when they became bridegrooms themselves (Landesa, 2013b: 22). One adolescent boy denied having any power to stop his family from demanding dowry at the time of his marriage stating, ‘My parents will decide about this. …. I will say nothing regarding taking dowry’ (Landesa, 2013b: 22). One parent indicated that abandoning dowry might be unrealistic, ‘Dowry cannot be wished away. But what one can do is put away some part of it exclusively in the name of the daughter’ (Landesa, 2013b: 8).

V Analysis and Discussion

Next, I analyse the inclusion of men and boys in this ‘Girl Effect’ intervention (1) to show where the ‘Girl Effect’ discourse presents itself in practice, (2) to discuss the extent to which this ‘Girl Effect’ extends GAD approaches to working with men and boys and (3) to draw upon GAD scholarship to indicate how ‘Girl Effect’ or other projects intending to improve girls’ access to land might approach gender include men and boys.

1 Men and boys: Present/Absent, and a problem yet again

Even though men and boys are absent from ‘Girl Effect’ discourse, they participated in this ‘Girl Effect’ intervention. Engaging boys and men was not easy. Landesa staff acknowledged difficulty:

engaging men in community conversations, and learned that the reasons behind their low attendance could include the fact that the prevailing Indian model of directing development services through women has created a culture wherein men are less interested and assume they are not meant to be included (Landesa, 2013a: 7).

This observation resonates with WID critiques that women-only projects may alienate men, leading them to think that gender work does not involve them, which does little to transform gender norms (Chant, 2016a). As men have been missing from gender work for so long (Cornwall, 1997, 2000), they assumed this project was not for them either.

Despite their presence, boys and men still might be missed. When sensitizing men and boys to girls’ vulnerabilities, boys are mostly in the background listening to problems of and discourse about women and girls. Boys and men might not be interested in hearing what values they should have, as it implies that the values that they have are the obstacle. Men and boys might not be interested in participating in activities that dismantle the social structures through which they maintain power, wealth and privilege. While some boys might believe that they lose with gender equality, as they ‘benefit from the patriarchal dividend’ of current land inheritance practices (Connell, 2005: 1808), other boys may not feel this way, and some boys actually may not benefit from the patriarchal dividend.

This case study neither extends GAD approaches nor engages with GAD critiques about inclusion of boys and men. One, inclusion here resonates with the popular WID critique, ‘add men and boys and stir’. Two, boy-centred programming is not relational. Three, boys and men are the problem. A GAD approach would engage men and boys in discussion of the deeply held cultural beliefs and practices about who men and women are, what they do and awareness raising would reveal male privilege vis-à-vis females. This project would need to build a critical consciousness among boys and girls alone and together about land issues, more broadly, and the structural factors that might threaten or shape land ownership and use in the future. For example, economic reform programmes, urbanization and climate change might shape how both boy and girls will access and use land, and in turn will shape their gendered relations going forward. The challenge is to foster collaboration between boy and girls, men and women that promotes finding common ground and recognition of shared current or potentially future circumstance in order to create a ‘politics of alliance’ (Bojin, 2013: 366).

I will not be able to change the life of many girls. But, I should try to ensure that my sister gets equal rights. She has the right to live a life like me’ (Landesa, 2013a: 25).

2 Being political: Building solidarities between boys and girls and inter-generationally for structural change

The quote above is indicative of the change in thinking that a boy should verbalize and then internalize to provide a supportive environment for a girl to assert herself and demand her inheritance rights. Girls just need boys to change their attitudes. The above quote also illuminates how the project viewed power and where power operates. First, for girls and boys to change the social norms and structures that shape marriage, land inheritance and dowry practices, they must have negotiating power. Individual boys and girls in hierarchical societies such as India do not have such power. As children, they also do not have political power. Second, the problem of girls acquiring land, staying in school or not paying dowry was with the family and community. The sphere of the project was the local. However, boys, girls, men and women are embedded in relationships of power that extend beyond the local, and which also influence how land and/or education are useful or might be useful assets in the age of global economic restructuring.

As mentioned above, this ‘Girl Effect’ project did not use a GAD approach. It did bring boys and girls together so that they could collectively identify, confront inequalities and press for institutional/structural change. It did not build intergenerational and mixed-sex solidarity, creating bonds and partnerships between mothers and fathers with their sons and/or daughters rather than leaving girls alone to draw on confidence building measures and advocating for themselves (Mylan, 2014). Solidarities within and between groups of boys and girls and across generations may help those who wish to take action have the ‘power to’ do so (Kabeer, 2011; Gervais, 2012).

While this ‘Girl Effect’ project does not have evidence of intergenerational solidarity building that might promote positive intergenerational role modelling, it did create mixed-sex collaborations. As adults in community conversations came to a consensus on action planning pledging to hold one another accountable to their mutually agreed upon resolutions set out in action plans (Landesa, 2013b), alliances between men and women at the village level were built that might create new horizons for girls and boys. However, the power to envision new future for boys and girls lies with adults, is only in service of project goals (delaying marriage, creating assets for girls) and does not question relationships of power that ‘address root causes of poverty and the deep structural basis of gender inequality’ (Cornwall, 2016: 345).

It is no surprise that the project looks this way. First, to do so would be to engage in politics. With its narrative of adolescent girls’ empowerment as ‘individualistic, instrumental, neo-liberal’ (Cornwall and Anyidoho, 2010: 145) entrepreneurial, the ‘Girl Effect’ is both anti-political and anti-solidarity building with respect to its approach to what girls should do to solve poverty (Bent, 2013; Calkin, 2015; Switzer, 2013). Second, as Moeller (2013, 2014) found with ‘Girl Effect’ grantees in Brazil, a grantee is unlikely to challenge the logic of its donor and engage in project activities that actively work against the very neoliberal system that brought the donor into being.

3 Moving beyond ‘objective’ metrics: Asking questions about ‘subjective’ relationships

The Nike Foundation has its own M&E strategy to test its theory. It relies heavily on quantifiable indicators. If empowerment is a process and not an endpoint and entails the ‘ability to make choices’ (Kabeer, 1999: 437), then quantifiable measures bound to discrete project time frames do not easily capture such change. The ‘Girl Effect’ case presented here captured whether or not boys expressed ‘more progressive attitudes towards women, marriage, dowry, and inheritance’ (Landesa, 2013a: 22), yet it did not include processual questions about whether or not, and if so, how boys (and girls) engage parents, siblings and community leaders in norm changing processes. The ‘Girl Effect’ M&E systems comes up short on GAD measurement. Kabeer (1999) and Cornwall (2016) call for changes in development methodologies. Processual questions are needed: do girls advocate to stay in school and what do they say when advocating to do so, do boys want to stop the practice of dowry and what do they say to convince their parents not accept it, and, why do boys and girls take the risk to challenge prevailing social norms. Asking such questions would create a deeper focus on how boys and girls attempt to change gendered hierarchical relationships within the family that moves beyond the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ circled on a questionnaire (i.e., are girls of school-going age attending school?). The metrics that such a questionnaire generate concretize ‘Girl Effect’ discourse, as they focus on individual accomplishment (Switzer, 2013) and the asset and opportunity building objectives of girl-centred investment rather than on ‘promoting their individual-and collective-rights as an intrinsically good goal’ (Chant, 2016b: 315–316). Furthermore, men and boys might accept the need to change in principle and answer project-related M&E questions accordingly, but may still act in ways that sustain male privilege (Connell, 2005).

A GAD methodological approaches requires investment in longitudinal research to understand the complex set of contextual factors that shape decisions about land inheritance, dowry and marriage. A GAD-inspired methodology would be attentive to the mutually constitutive nature of gender roles and relations including how masculinity and femininity are practised and understood. This ‘Girl Effect’ case study lends itself to such a set of research questions about honour, power and privilege vis-à-vis land. For example, if a daughter receives her share of family land and her husband abandons the tradition of patrilocality and moves in with her, how does he navigate his new ‘resident son-in-law’ status? To what extent does the abandonment of patrilocality influence agricultural decision-making and subsequently productivity? If a daughter-in-law never moves into her in-law’s home, how do gender roles and relationship between newlyweds unfold in her natal home? While such questions have GAD relevance and focus on the relational aspects of gender, they might be construed as ‘too academic’ (Cornwall et al., 2007) for development circles.

VI Conclusion: Lessons for GAD and the ‘Girl Effect’

Women’s access to land is not a straightforward process. Gendered power relations within the family influence land inheritance, dowry and asset creation, closing the gender asset gap cannot occur without acknowledging the position of girls as children and siblings. However, an individual man’s or woman’s access to land must be understood within a larger social, structural context and take into consideration how formal laws and policies influence land availability and access.

The ‘Girl Effect’ is a ‘resurgence of the WID approach in which liberal feminists attempt to get the development set to take more notice of women’ as adolescent girls (Cornwall and Anyidoho, 2010: 145). Congruent with Girl Effect discourse, girls are presented as homogenous group and a natural ‘target’ for land distribution. With land in hand, the project maintains a universal approach to empowering girls, the individual girl can release her inner entrepreneur, grow a garden, invest and lift herself out of poverty. Yet, unlike the ‘Girl Effect’ discourse which sidelines boys and men, Landesa included men and boys in programming, albeit in a largely instrumental way that reproduced the notion boys and men oppress women and girls, women and girls are victims to patriarchal land inheritance practices, and the household is a more a site of conflict than cooperation (Tripathy, 2010).

The SGL project reflects some of the so-called ‘best practices’ for programing with boys and men such as speeding up the generational shift to address gender inequality by including boys and focussing on domestic care work (Peacock and Barker, 2014), but it also possesses a simple, a contextualized and undifferentiated view of men and boys’ lives. When the boy quoted above says that he will ‘say nothing regarding taking dowry’, he might be saying that he will not do anything because he agrees with the practice and wants the material benefits or because convincing his parents not to take dowry would be too much work and after only two rounds of sessions he neither feels confident to undertake nor any sense of urgency to take action. Development practice that essentializes boys, potentially instrumentalizes boys for what they can do for girls, or privileges boys as saviours will likely update patriarchy rather than dismantle it (Cynthia Enloe, personal communication, 21 March 2016).

Donors interested in gender equality and empowerment need to allocate funding to boys and men that is at least equivalent to that for women and girls as well as provide support for mixed-sex and intergenerational alliance building (Bojin, 2013). Equally important are resources that help development practitioners to think more deeply about the history, context and structural relationships of power beyond the local and situate local land relations in state or national context. Closing the gender asset gap in West Bengal or elsewhere cannot occur if men and boys are treated as the problem, in the absence of solidarity building, and with limited understanding of power.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Jeanne Marecek and two anonymous peer reviewers for astute comments and suggestions that improved earlier drafts. I appreciate the time taken by a journal editor to discuss article revisions with me. I am grateful to Denise Humphreys Bebbington for her encouragement to complete this project and helping me to hone this analysis. All errors are my own.

Notes

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