Barriers to Girls’ Agency in East and Southern Africa - Mapping Report

AMPLIFY Girls' mapping report, Barriers to Girls' Agency in East and Southern Africa, documents the structural and non-structural barriers — plural legal systems, unsafe and costly schooling, poverty, restricted SRHR access, harmful norms, and digital exclusion — that constrain adolescent girls' ability to decide and act.

Taken together, the evidence points to a single conclusion. Adolescent girls across the region are not short of ambition, capability, or resolve. What they lack is a set of systems built to back them. Girls’ agency is not a soft social outcome that follows once other development goals are met. It is missing development infrastructure — a question of governance, financing, and justice.
Our proposition is clear:

Girls are not failing. Systems are failing girls. Agency for every girl, systems that back her.

Read the evidence from the findings and our policy recommendations and community-level interventions to improve girls' agency across the region.