Because I am a Girl: Urban and Digital Frontiers - Plan International

Martin Dixon / Dixon Deux Yeux
are not gender specific.” 43 They are even
less likely to take account of both gender
and age, although adolescent girls’ needs,
expectations and risks in moving to the city
are different from those of older women,
younger girls and even boys their own age.
The decision to migrate can be a complex
combination of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, as
we show below.
Pull…
Adolescent girls may migrate in search
of the promise of a better life – in South
Africa, Johannesburg is often called Eboli –
City of Gold. They hope to find education
or work. Some go to be reunited with
relatives, to seek opportunities for leisure
and entertainment, or simply because they
have heard reports from peers of positive
city experiences. 44 They may think that in
the city there will be safety in numbers, a
greater acceptance of difference, including
difference of sexual orientation, and more
potential and choice about their own lives.
One study of adolescents who migrated
from the village to the city in Burkina Faso
noted the attraction of television and
fashion: “Most of the adolescent migrants
aspired to look smart and when they first
came to the capital, some got blinded by
the bright city lights and the abundance
of fashionable clothing and accessories.
Living in the city provided them with
the opportunity to follow radio and TV
programmes on a regular basis… or to go to
video clubs showing action-, vampire- and
sometimes [Nigerian] Nollywood movies,
usually dubbed in French. Their ideas about
which ‘looks’ were smart changed, but their
small incomes of 3,000 to 7,000 francs per
month – between one-tenth and one-fourth
of the formal minimum wage – soon made
them realise their limitations. Their ability to
assert particular identities was circumscribed
by their rural origins and poverty.” 45
Other girls come to the city because they
hope for more tolerance in the city than
they had in the village. 46 Girls like Radha,
now 28, who ran away from her home in
Kerala, India, when she was 15 because her
parents wanted to get her married. Radha
was present at the launch of the first helpline
for lesbian women in Chennai in February
2009. She and her lesbian partner, she says,
Girls learn
to sew in
Senegal.
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