Global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) address social, humanitarian, and development issues and fill gaps in government services, provide aid, advocate for policy changes, and pioneer new approaches to complex social problems. However, do NGOs in practice lift up communities and empower the community members, particularly women, they seek to serve?

Erin Moore, the Dr. Carl F. Asseff Assistant Professor in Anthropology and the History of Medicine in the Department of Anthropology at Ohio State, is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist seeking to answer this question. Her research brings critical, humanist perspectives to the study of global health, disease, and development. 

More specifically, Moore studies global NGO governance, critical development studies, women’s and girls’ rights initiatives, and African politics of pretense. Her research explores the global girls’ empowerment movement, which proposes that investing in girls is the silver-bullet solution to global poverty, in light of the fertility control logics underpinning its mission. It also holds up strategies of seduction and deception practiced by young Ugandan women as a model for thinking about how people manage power asymmetrical arrangements of various kinds.

Moore’s Mershon funded project took her to Uganda and gave her insight into how the “aid chain” works, what it takes for global advocacy movements to cohere, and how people might reject or resist projects carried out by global health or international development while acquiring resources from these projects in the meantime.

“For cultural anthropologists,” said Moore, “my project is innovative in that it brings Black and African feminist theory together to understand what is unfolding not just in Kampala but across the aid chain.”

In addition to her fieldwork in Uganda, Moore completed her book manuscript and hosted a manuscript workshop with readers from Ohio State, Columbia, University of Toronto, Concordia, and University of Houston at the Mershon Center. Her first book, Detoothing Development: Promise and Profit in the Making of a Global NGO Campaign, is under contract with the University of Chicago press. Set within the production of the world’s largest, most concerted campaign to empower adolescent girls, the book takes up an idiom from Kampala’s intimate economies—to “detooth” is to take a man’s money with the promise of sex—as a metaphor for understanding the many ways Ugandans across the aid chain interact with development. Merging ethnographic attention to the ongoing importance of patron-client arrangements in East Africa with Black and African feminist theories of refusal, the book conceptualizes “detoothing” as a tool for understanding how people navigate power asymmetrical economic arrangements of various kinds. 

Lead photo: Kampala, Uganda