Girl-led research and action: how we build power together

All around the world, adolescent girls living in poverty face unequal power dynamics that affect their everyday lives. This impacts their capacity to get the support they need, and to make their own decisions about various aspects of their lives.

These structural inequalities shape their ability to claim their rights, such as the right to be listened to, to access quality education and information, support services, and community spaces, to make decisions about their own bodies or to live free from violence.

Girls are too often on the frontlines in times of crises, and in times of crisis these inequalities get exacerbated. Their voices are discounted or unheard, their safety, economic security, education, health and wellbeing are under threat, and they have little access to protection systems and safety nets. 

Across different contexts, adolescent girls have demonstrated remarkable capacity for leadership – they are best placed to identify the issues that affect their lives, connect with other adolescent girls and propose relevant and actionable solutions. To achieve this, ActionAid is facilitating girl-led research and action methodology, which prioritise adolescent girls’ knowledge, experience, strategies and solutions to their own challenges. This provides an opportunity to shift power back to girls and express their power to make change.

I know that girls have power and I want everyone to believe it."

Researcher, Bangladesh

More about girl-led research and action

To identify the issues which are truly restricting adolescent girls’ lives, an international ActionAid team launched the Girl Led Research and Action (GLRA) approach. The research phase is shaped by a collaborative, participatory action research methodology which employs an intersectional feminist and decolonial approach, recognising adolescent girls as powerful agents of change. It addresses the crucial gap in research to do with the experiences of adolescent girls, by centring them as the leaders in this piece of work as the lead researchers in this study: from identifying relevant questions to collecting and analysing data and developing recommendations – the adolescent girls did it all. 

The girl-led action phase supports advocacy and action work enabling the girls to enact change based on the findings of their research. From local government offices to art competitions, the girls identify what their spheres of influence are, and then use different advocacy tools to try and generate change that will truly and positively impact their lives.