INTERVIEW: Sahel's resilient adolescent girls' voices

Change is possible for adolescent girls. To make it happen will require a profound institutional and collective rethink of our ways of working, and our ways of investing in the present and future of adolescent girls. On the International Day of the Girl (11 October), a new UNICEF report on building resilience among adolescent girls highlights the perspectives of girls and their communities in the Sahel region. 

We sat down with one of the people behind the report, UNICEF’s Regional Adviser for Adolescent Development in West and Central Africa, Shelly Abdool, to find out more about the study. 

What for you is the one big lesson that you've picked up from this report? 

I don't know if it surprised me but there's a confirmation that if you don't speak to girls, if you don't listen to girls, then you don’t have a complete picture on the issues they are facing and what could work. The combination of hearing from girls, hearing from their parents, hearing from service providers, hearing from local officials, gives us the full kind of 360-degree view of what the situation is, what needs to be done and what can be done. There's a difference between how girls perceive their lives, their barriers, and what others perceive as their barriers, experiences or aspirations. 

What do humanitarian and development actors miss out on when they don't listen to a girl's perspective? 

The daily experience of being a girl. And how that affects their interactions with services, peers, community members – even parents. That could be when they go to the health centre where they're not always perceived as a patient with equal rights, but as a girl who is judged culturally - blamed even - for circumstances that are not their fault. In the household or community, for cultural reasons, they are treated differently. If she has experienced violence, is pregnant, is already a mother or is married and not in school, then she's perceived and treated completely differently than a girl that is in school, who may still live with her parents. And, being treated differently means they have different opportunities, may face increased isolation or choose to not seek services they actually need because they fear discrimination. 

So certain girls are in a way being stigmatized when they approach the essential services that should be available for everyone?

Exactly, and not only for what their conditions are but because of what communities may believe about girls. In many cases, communities believe that girls are minors, they're children, so they ‘don't have very much to say – or anything of value to say’ - and at the same time they are put in adult roles to be mothers, to be wives, to take care of others, to earn income and support their families. This duality of being a girl with adult responsibilities is less well addressed by service providers or in policies. And the gender rules we heard from the study clearly show that being a girl is not the same as being a boy in how you are perceived, treated – even valued. Not every girl grows up in a protective environment with two parents, where they can go to school, where there are roads, where there is water or where there is peace. 

For the most part, the study indicates that girls are expected to not be vocal unless they've had an education – and if they try to express opinions or contribute to household or community decisions, their lack of access to education can cast doubt on the legitimacy of their words and actions...even by other girls because the broader social beliefs are passed down to girls themselves. The study shows that girls who do not have their parents’ support or the chance to gather in girls’ clubs supported by the township or NGOs, are not considered able to make a difference.  While not all girls in the study area have these options, they all express the desire and capacity to make a difference.  Those that are raising their voices, making change and overcoming obstacles are showing a new model of what it means to be a girl in these communities, inspiring hope around them.   

What motivated you to carry out this research? 

Within the programme Building Resilience in the Sahel, supported by BMZ, there was always a focus on children and adolescents, but with less explicit attention to our priority around adolescent girls. We could not definitively say if and how we were reaching girls, and if so, if we were contributing to reverting situations of inequality or maintaining the status quo for them. That's really the genesis of this research. We found ourselves thinking: ‘Wait a second, as opposed to just going in and making some programmatic changes based on what we know works elsewhere, let's hear from the girls in the Sahel and a range of different partners’. 

Was there one thing that stood out from you when you were going through the report?

On the one hand, the fact that girls across the three countries have resigned themselves to the situation of their lives even as they aspire to a lot more. For example, many of them that aren't in school said that they didn't want to go back to school because they weren't interested. And yet when we asked them   the highest level of education they would like to achieve, the majority said university. So, it's like they're resigned to the fact that either the schools are closed or there's no access to schools or there are no books or there are no teachers or there's no money to pay for school, which makes them ‘uninterested’.  And they are making the best of their lives with what they have, such as learning skills to earn an income.  But if they could dream of their ideal situation, they aspire to more.  It read as if they're not even allowing themselves to dream. We have a role to play in not only giving them the chance to dream, but also to work with local partners to make their dreams come true.

On the other hand, girls express a profound love, respect and consideration for their parents. Girls don't want to do anything that is going to put their parents in an even harder situation. Many come from households where their parents can't afford to either send them to school or send them outside of their village to be able to go to school, or provide some seed funds for them to start a small business to generate income. They live in villages that have limited social services, sometimes not even a school or health post close by. So, they want to ease their parents’ burden and exercise independence. Those that earn income through small activities often take care of their own basic needs such as clothing, hygiene supplies, etc. as a way of alleviating that burden on the household budget. This is a demonstration of girls’ solidarity, but also how from a very young age their gendered role of care-taking manifests. On the flip side, their parents also recognize that their conditions – monetary or otherwise – impede them for providing what they would like their daughters to have. Mothers reflect on their own experience of being a girl and express a desire to see things improve for their daughters, fathers too. But the infrastructure, services or financial means are not always there. 

Child marriage is extremely high in the Sahel region – what did your interviews find in terms of identifying the major causes?

What comes out of the study is that the practice happens either due to the absence of school opportunities, to leave the village and either study or work elsewhere and still be within a protected family environment, or a lack of financial resources to be able to provide for basic things whether it's clothing, food or shelter for their daughters. 

When we asked why girls are taken out of school, that's when the issue of child marriage came up.   References to ‘if she's not performing well in school or if there is no school or if she comes home and she still can't read, we don't see the value in sending her to school, then her father will decide to get her married’.  It was very clear that it's the father that makes that choice. The broader social expectations for girls to marry and be mothers as women is clear across all three countries, but the timing of these social roles appears to be clearly understood as best delayed.  

The access, or the absence of opportunities or options seems to make marriage the ‘best chance’ to protect them, even with the full knowledge at least from the mothers that we heard from that it puts them in front of another set of risks. Some adult participants indicated that in the past even if marriage happened at a younger age, motherhood didn't happen right away. Yet, this is trend seems to be changing; indeed, a high number of girls interviewed in the study are already mothers. We need to do better at developing alternative options with families, girls and communities to be able to interrupt what came across as an impossible dilemma for parents.

The study on adolescent girls’ resilience was conducted by UNICEF and the Population Council's Girl, Innovation, and Research Learning (GIRL) Centre in Mali, Mauritania and Niger in 2023-2024, with the generous support of BMZ. UNICEF and BMZ are committed to address the challenges, and stand with adolescent girls, and all young people of the Sahel, for a hopeful future that will progressively untap the region’s true potential. Click here to download the report.