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In recent years, Sierra Leone has emerged as a key player in international and regional affairs. Most notably, Sierra Leone was elected as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for 2024 to 2025, and served as the president of the Security Council for August 2024. This talk outlines how implementing global agendas championing gender and education equity for adolescent girls, especially pregnant teenagers and young mothers, was instrumental in establishing Sierra Leone as a reputable leader in the international community following the country’s civil war from 1991 to 2002 and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Drawing on ethnographic engagements with secondary schoolgirls in Sierra Leone, Kelly will demonstrate how these universal norms simultaneously reproduced gendered and racialized logics of development that often marginalized young women in their schools and local communities.

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