Stemming Girls’ Chronic Poverty: Catalysing Development Change by Building Just Social Institutions

Childhood, adolescence and early adulthood remain for many girls and young women a period of deprivation, danger and vulnerability, resulting in a signifcant lack of agency and critical development defcits. In many cases, overlapping and intersecting experiences of deprivation, foregone human development opportunities and abuse or exploitation serve to perpetuate and intensify poverty for girls and women over the life-course. Girls’ vulnerabilities in relation to poverty dynamics are diferent to those of boys and to those of adult women. This is in part because of their relative powerlessness and the particularities of their life stage. What happens at this critical time in their lives can reinforce their poverty status and that of their of spring, or infuence their movement into or out of poverty.