Resourcing Girls to Thrive: Research exploring funding for adolescent girls' rights 2023

Abstract

The Resourcing Girls' to Thrive research provides critical insights for funders, policy-makers and practitioners who want to support and deliver transformational programs for adolescent girls.Working within feminist, women's rights movements and adolescent girls' and young feminist activism, it was evident to the research team that the funding landscape for adolescent girls is not well understood or developed. Searching for the money that flows to adolescent girls often feels like wandering a valley floor within the mountains, crossing a stream every now and then, and seeing only the features of the landscape within the immediate view. The larger picture and its interconnectedness is obscured, shrouded by the lack of clear and consistent data and tracking, like an incomplete map. Despite adolescent girls being a unique population, there is a disconnect between girls' expressed needs, and the resources flowing for their work and activism. This was corroborated by funders who resource adolescent girls from a feminist perspective and see girls as political actors — and so this research was commissioned. It seeks to offer sensemaking of the adolescent girls' funding landscape to stimulate a conversation and reflection about how to resource adolescent girls to thrive. It does so using a feminist approach to funding adolescent girls as the way to bring about long-lasting transformation in their lives as the point of departure.Methodologies included four workshops with 31 girls (8 countries), a survey and two workshops with 13 feminist girls' funders, complemented by a literature review (49 resources), public data review of 71 actors, six data collecting entities, and 21 key informant interviews. All of the findings from these methods were then further sensemade through virtual workshops and desk reviews with nine Working Group members. More details on the methodologies can be found in annex 4

    Similar works