Lately, I’ve been thinking about the general discourse we have on women and girls’ access to education in the Global South. The conversation always fixates on their potential: the “would-be” inventors, the “could-be” innovators, the brilliant leaders who never got the chance to witness their ideas in full bloom. Global development imagines these girls less as students and more as deferred assets.

But what about the women and girls who accessed those same schools — briefly or barely — and still struggled and stagnated with their intellect? The ones who didn’t excel, who couldn’t grasp “basic” or critical concepts, who weren’t framed as prodigies-in-waiting?

Why are they invisible? Why are we ashamed of them?

Why is their worth only manufactured through genius, and not through their existence? Why do we only invest in girls when they’ve met the prerequisite to be a poster child for global empowerment?

Precisely, because our development narratives only know how to justify care through projected utility. Because we’ve tied a girl’s worth to the promise of economic return. The “girl genius” also becomes an economic archetype. Suddenly, it starts to make sense why we are called ‘tokens’; we are valuable currency only insofar as we are usable.

In this economy of worth, a girl’s performance in school becomes the metric that decides whether she is “worth” saving. Progress indicators, after all, have to indicate some type of ‘potential’ worthy of investment.

As a matter of fact, these girls force us to confront the truth that dignity cannot be safeguarded by GDP projections or inspirational storytelling. Their futures were never something to be forecasted, romanticized, or extracted as a heroic resource.

But a world that only protects ‘potential’ will always abandon the girls who are also present, but only quantified into an “average”, in these classrooms. Global development doesn’t need more “girl geniuses”, as much as it needs the courage to see girls who aren’t exceptional, as worthy of care.

What global development refuses to see about girls who are not exceptional is simple: that their value lies in their personhood, not just what they can promise.

Maybe the real question was never what these girls could become, or wanted to be when they grew up. Perhaps it was whether we were willing to value them before they became anything at all.