what’s this about the girl effect?
Have you seen the Girl Effect video yet? It’s pretty good. It’s catchy, dynamic, simple, engaging. It’s all bright colours and non-confronting silhouettes and devoid of heavy-handed poverty porn (though there are subtleties…did you notice the flies?).
I loved it the first time I saw it, and I still love it now. But this critique over at Aid Watch makes a few salient points, like:
“What poor countries need to stimulate sustainable growth are not women taking out loans to buy cows, but better governance and better terms of trade with rich countries.”
and
“In the slideshow, Westerners are invited to “fix this picture,” and told that if they invest in girls they will change the course of history. This message gives more agency to Westerners than to the girls it claims to be empowering.” - Anna Carella, PhD student, Vanderbilt University, USA.
While I agree with Carella that The Girl Effect video is not perfect, I still think it’s a great communications tool. It’s a far cry from ‘the usual’ messages we get about poverty, and I believe the audience-reach it has received (over 268,000 on YouTube alone) means I can live with the nuances that are missed.
In terms of tools available to help educate people who live a life like mine about the realities of living a life in poverty, this is right up the top in my bag of tricks.
But it does make sense to be aware of what is being traded off to get the messages across.
Update 14 Jan 11: A rebuttal to Carella’s critique has now been published, making a few salient points of its own - It takes more than a cow…but girls still count by Amanda Glassman, Director of Global Health Policy at the Center for Global Development, and Miriam Temin, co-author of Start With A Girl
