Girlhood, participation and empowerment in Tanzania: climbing material and discursive walls

ABSTRACT

In this paper I reflect upon encounters with ‘young people’s participation’ during ethnographic research on girlhood and sexual agency with teenage girls in Tanzania. I argue that methodology which centralises participants’ experiences is particularly important in research on issues related to sex and sexuality, where young people’s voices are often disregarded or downplayed. However, such an approach might run up against a number of practical challenges. This paper draws on fieldwork conducted in two sites during 2014 and 2015 to show that attention to the networks of relationships within which young people are embedded and the structural conditions which might generate or obstruct sexual agency is essential for research which seeks to promote their meaningful participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• participatory methods
• agency
• young people
• international development

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the girls at the safe house in Arusha and at Tufurahi School who participated in this research and confided their opinions, which led to the arguments made in this paper. Thank you also to Renske Visser and the anonymous reviewers at Children’s Geographies for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.