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| 5 Oct 2026 | |
| Written by Sally Ndwiga | |
| Blogs: "Perspectives, Provocations & Initiatives" |
What if development programmes are looking for leadership in the wrong places? Working with girls and young women in Githurai has changed how I understand agency, power and leadership.
When we talk about young women's leadership, I have noticed that we often know what we are looking for before we enter the room.
We look for the girl who raises her hand first, speaks confidently in front of adults, leads a campaign or represents her community at a conference. We recognise her as a leader because her leadership is visible.
But what about the girl who teaches another girl a skill? The young woman who uses her voice to tell stories that others rarely hear? The teenager who supports her peers through a difficult situation?
Are these not also forms of leadership?
I have spent the past few years working with adolescent girls and young women in Githurai, Nairobi, through The Femiscope Initiative, a youth- and women-led community organisation. Our work includes sexual and reproductive health, menstrual health, gender-based violence, mental wellbeing, education and economic empowerment.
This work has made me increasingly question the assumption that young women simply need to be made into leaders.
Sometimes, they are already exercising leadership. We just do not recognise it.
I saw this during one of our crochet sessions.
One of the girls, whom I will call June, quickly picked up crocheting while some of the other girls were still learning the basics. Rather than keeping what she had learned to herself, she began showing others how to crochet and use the glue gun.
Nothing about the moment looked like conventional leadership.
There was no certificate. No microphone. No leadership title.
There was simply a girl who had learned something, noticed that someone else was struggling and decided to help.
To me, that is leadership.
It is also a reminder that leadership does not always begin when someone gives a young woman a position. Sometimes it begins when she recognises that she has something to offer and chooses to share it.
This distinction matters because development programmes can sometimes treat agency as something provided to girls through skills, knowledge or training.
Recent work from the Learning and Action Alliance for Girls' Agency (LAAGA) challenges this assumption. O'Donoghue and Ossai (2026) argue that girls' agency is dynamic and contextual, shaped not only by individual capabilities but also by relationships, institutions and wider systems.
Their work challenges development practitioners to look beyond the idea that programmes simply create agency by equipping girls with new skills. Instead, we should pay attention to the agency girls already exercise in their everyday lives.
This resonates with what I see in Githurai.
A girl does not necessarily become an agent because she completes a leadership workshop. She may already be making decisions, supporting her peers, advocating for herself or imagining a different future.
The question is therefore not only:
How do we empower girls to become leaders?
It is also:
What leadership are girls already exercising, and what would enable it to have greater influence?
Development language can unintentionally create a divide between organisations and communities.
There are programme staff and beneficiaries. Experts and participants. People who design interventions and people who receive them.
Yet the girls we work with possess knowledge that no project proposal can fully capture.
They know which conversations are possible at home. They know which adults they can trust. They understand the pressures their peers face. They know which issues matter to other young people.
They also know when a programme is working for them.
This is why participation cannot simply mean giving young people a microphone.
If girls are invited to share their experiences but have no role in shaping priorities, activities or decisions, we may be practising consultation rather than meaningful leadership.
For practitioners, this requires humility. We need to enter communities prepared not only to teach, but also to listen and learn.
I have seen this particularly clearly through our work with young mothers at Wings of Hope Rescue Home.
Teenage motherhood is understandably discussed through vulnerability: interrupted education, stigma, economic insecurity, early pregnancy and limited opportunities.
These realities matter. But vulnerability can become so dominant that it becomes the only story we tell.
One young woman I have worked with, Halima (pseudonym), is now 20. During one of our sessions, she spoke about her interest in presenting and how she wanted to use that talent to help develop the home's social media platforms.
Her ambition was not simply to promote the organisation. She wanted to create space for more stories about teenage pregnancy to be heard and understood. At the same time, she was considering how she could strengthen her presenting skills to mentor younger girls coming after her.
Again, there was no formal leadership position attached to this.
But Halima was thinking about representation, storytelling, skills development and mentoring.
She was not simply asking, "What can this programme do for me?"
She was asking, in her own way, "What can I do with what I have learned, and how can I use it to create space for someone else?"
That is agency.
Young adolescents participate in a practical skills session at Wings of Hope Rescue Home in Nairobi.
This raises an uncomfortable question for development practitioners: what kinds of leadership are our programmes designed to recognise and measure?
We count girls trained. We count sessions conducted. We count participants reached. We celebrate young women who speak at conferences, join youth advisory boards or become community champions.
These achievements matter. But they represent only a fraction of how leadership happens.
What happens to the girl who influences five friends but never attends a conference?
What happens to the young mother who shares what she has learned with others but is never labelled a "community champion"?
What happens to June teaching another girl to crochet?
What happens to Halima imagining how her voice can create space for other young mothers?
These actions may be difficult to capture through conventional indicators, but they can be significant expressions of agency.
The challenge is not to abandon measurement. It is to ask whether our measurements reflect the realities of the people we claim to serve.
My experience in Githurai has changed what meaningful youth empowerment means to me.
We should continue providing knowledge, skills, mentorship and opportunities. But we should also create spaces where girls can define the problems that matter to them, shape solutions and influence decisions.
We need to ask young women what leadership means in their own contexts before deciding what leadership should look like.
We also need to recognise that leadership does not always look confident, public or confrontational.
Sometimes it is a group of girls deciding that something in their community needs to change.
And sometimes it is simply a young woman deciding that her circumstances will not determine the limits of her aspirations.
For me, the most important shift is from creating leaders to recognising leadership.
If development practitioners want to support girls' agency, we must look beyond the leadership workshop and the conference stage. We must pay attention to the everyday decisions, relationships and collective actions through which girls already exercise power.
Perhaps the question is not whether young women in communities like Githurai are leaders.
Perhaps the question is whether we have learned how to recognise leadership when it does not look the way we expected it to.
Not all leadership comes with a title. Sometimes, it starts with a girl deciding that her voice and future matter.
All names in this blog have been changed to protect privacy.
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Kinyanjui, J., Otieno, M., Okudi, C. A., & O'Donoghue, J. L. (2025, June 30). Perspectives on agency from adolescent girls in the Karamoja Cluster in Kenya and Uganda. Brookings Institution.
O'Donoghue, J. L., & Ossai, E. D. (2026, September 9). Rethinking girls' agency through collective learning. Brookings Institution.
Open-access article and further reading: Rethinking girls' agency through collective learning
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IDS.