​Poised at the intersection between childhood and the world of adults, adolescent girls face unique challenges to the full development and exercise of their capabilities. And yet they may also hold the key to effecting positive development outcomes that could reverberate across future generations. ODI’s DFID-funded project under the Accountable Grant, Transforming the lives of girls and young women, is a multi-year, multi-country study exploring the complex ways in which adolescent girls’ capabilities are shaped and/or constrained by gender discriminatory social norms, attitudes and practices, and how other overlapping and intersecting experiences of poverty, deprivation and exclusion serve to intensify and perpetuate vulnerabilities.

The first year of field research was carried out between 2012 and 2013 in Viet Nam, Uganda, Nepal, and Ethiopia, and the empirical, conceptual and methodological lessons learned and emerging issues to come out of this first year are presented in this paper.

Carol Watson and Caroline Harper