Girls at the crossroads: puberty is a time to pivot

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By ANASTASIA ASHMAN


At expat+HAREM we like to think of crossroads as places of opportunity. But if you’re female in the emerging world, puberty is the crux of a lifetime. A time and a place where you can change your fortune. Your family’s health. Your community’s future. Or, as you cross from childhood to womanhood you can become the most vulnerable person.

Adolescent girls may seem unlikely agents of change since they’re often removed from the public sphere when they head into puberty, without a record of their birth, citizenship — or even their identity. They disappear without a trace.

How can such nonentities raise the standard of living for everyone around them? This video illustrates the pivotal realities faced by millions of 12-year-old girls. Please take 3 minutes to watch.

“Six hundred million 12-year-olds in developing nations are the world’s greatest untapped solution to global poverty,” declares The Girl Effect. And the most vulnerable girls have the power to make the largest contribution.

This realization is the shocking heart of The Girl Effect movement, a campaign made of thousands of smaller campaigns. expat+HAREM is proud to participate today in a Girl Effect blogging campaign leading up to Universal Children’s Day on November 20.

The more people act to support a revolution of girls and young women around the world (like funding schooling and entrepreneurship, legal assistance, healthcare and job training and these Girl Effect programs in Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa), the faster we’ll see the change girls can bring when they’re on the path to their potential. The sooner their crossroads can be a place of power and opportunity and choice.

Are you involved in a Girl Effect project or campaign? Share it with us!

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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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(Check out the 100+ other bloggers in Tara Sophia Mohr‘s Girl Effect blogging campaign…and add your own blog post to the mix. Follow #girleffect tweets on Twitter.)

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Tagged as: #girleffect, Asia, Bangladesh, Caribbean, change-agent, child bride, child marriage, choice, cycle of poverty, developing world, domestic violence, education gap, emerging world, gender violence, girl, Girl Effect, HIV, India, infant mortality, International Children's Day, Latin America, maternal mortality, opportunity, puberty, sex trade, sexual slavery, standard of living, sub-Saharan Africa, Tara Sophia Mohr, teenage pregnancy

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  • Anonymous

    Even literature abounds with classic coming of age stories of boy protagonists; an artful acknowledgment of boys’ lives as a cultural barometer. In african literature I found, time and again, the health of the newly independent state reified as a 12 year old boy’s tumultuous world. And girls lives? Either not considered “telling” in the same way, or an afterthought. Like “A Thousand Splendid Suns” to the foundational “Kite Runner”. That was a super nerdy way of saying I’d love to see even more writers exploring the lives of girls as they relate, even metaphorically, to the stability of the state, the health and vibrancy of culture.

  • http://twitter.com/endeavoringE Elmira Bayrasli

    Glad to see Expat Harem involved in this important campaign!

    • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

      As a development world veteran Elmira, what’s your take on the question of a girl’s community ‘not wanting the girl effect’ — that is, if empowering girls would upset the cultural apple cart — that a fellow blogger in this campaign writes about today?

  • Catherine Bayar

    I can’t thank you enough for this post – I’ve added one of my own. “A safe place” – something I took for granted when I was growing up, yet something my Kurdish sisters did not always have. My workshops are in their honor, as a small way I can perhaps help the next generation to beat those statistics you describe.

    • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

      Thanks so much Catherine — for your “Girl Effect Hits Home” answer at your own blog today!

      I share your feeling of being reinvigorated in our own instincts and current efforts by the statistics of Girl Effect.

  • Anonymous

    “as you cross from childhood to womanhood you can become the most vulnerable person.”… really struck me because of how precarious that time could be if you don’t have the support you need and your basic needs met. Thanks for sharing statistics, too, and how important it is that girls have a voice.

    • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

      Thanks Rose.

      Looking through all the Girl Effect resources I was particularly bowled over by these young girls’ lack of access to systems to record their existence, their age, all the things they’d need to make a case (against a child marriage, for instance) or *apply for pretty much anything*. And, another thing I wasn’t expecting to see but accounts for a large part of their sense of independence: the lack of a safe place to gather and commune with other girls. A place to discuss their lives with people who are not their relatives.

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  • http://www.giuliettathemuse.com/blog Giulietta Nardone

    Hi Anastasia!

    Great title. I’m supporting all my fellow Girl Effect Bloggers. Still trying to get my linky thang to work!

    Giulietta

    • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

      Thanks Giulietta, it’s a pleasure to be aligned with so many inspirational bloggers (almost 50 at last count!) in this campaign, you included.

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