Being a young girl in Nigeria is not easy. Before she even reaches adolescence, she will begin to carry the burden of generations of religious, cultural and negative societal expectations, many of which hold her back, and some of which are unimaginably damaging.

She will go from being a daughter in her father’s home, to a wife and mother in her husband’s. She will probably become one of the 6.3 million girls in Nigeria who are not in school – a number higher than anywhere else in the world – and it’s likely she comes from Northern Nigeria where, in some areas, the threat of Boko Haram makes reaching her particularly difficult.

There is a lot of good work being done to offer services and assistance to such women and girls, but tackling the root causes of poverty can only be effective if we truly understand what these root causes are. We can only do this by talking to the girls themselves and understanding their reality.

Let’s go back to that girl in Nigeria. There is a knock at her door. It’s a stranger – often a Western adult – who has arrived uninvited, holding a clipboard, asking intimate questions about her and her family’s life. She is unlikely to give a full and honest answer, if she is allowed – by her dad or the head of her household – to answer at all. In both instances, results are compromised.

And therein lies the problem; girls in places like Northern Nigeria are not being authentically heard. Conventional research approaches simply don’t work effectively in these communities; they are slow, expensive and ineffective. Reports – often six months in the making – are dismissed because of research findings that lack credibility or new insight. This is a global predicament faced by those seeking to understand emergent consumer markets or hard-to-reach communities.

But, if we can plug this data gap, we will be able to accurately understand these girls’ worlds, and therefore empower them to reach their full potential.

That is why, two years ago, social purpose organisation to empower women, Girl Effect, began to develop Technology Enabled Girl Ambassadors (TEGA), an idea borne out of the understanding that an adolescent girl is more likely to respond to her peers – who understand her background and culture – than an adult stranger from a foreign country and culture. 

TEGA is a smartphone-based, peer-to-peer research tool that enables girls to gather better, faster, more scalable and authentic research in their own hard-to-reach communities. Girl Effect finds and trains 18- to 24-year-old girls – our TEGAs – living in the places we need to understand. Having partnered with the Market Research Society to create a curriculum, we then spend three months training TEGAs to become qualified interviewers.

Through a specially-developed app, made with the help of TEGAs and inspiration from the likes of Snapchat, Spotify, WhatsApp, banking and even karaoke apps, the girls conduct the research themselves. They then send the findings back to a content hub, where it is programmatically analysed within 15 minutes.

Any girl can become a TEGA, regardless of her education, background or tech knowledge. The app is simple, and includes an alert button, so if a TEGA is in trouble, we can get someone to her three-times faster than the average London ambulance responds to an emergency. We’re pleased that this function has never been used.

With TEGA, we have been able to draw a full picture of a girl’s life in Nigeria for the first time – insight that we have shared with some of the world’s largest NGOs.

Before TEGA, young girls in Northern Nigeria were perceived to be obedient, shy and compliant. TEGA research has revealed that they are confident, smart, and even slightly rebellious.

Our TEGAs also uncovered the significant role of paternal grandmothers in Nigerian families. Fathers are duty-bound to obey their mothers, and so, behind the scenes, the grandmother has enormous influence over important decisions, such as when girls get married, or whether they stay in school. Uncovering these family dynamics makes development interventions much more powerful and effective.

TEGA research has, for the first time, identified drug abuse as one of the main challenges facing youth in Nigeria’s Kano province. Girls viewed drugs as the key cause of crime, violence and unemployment. This influenced one of Girl Effect’s partners, whose $1 billion strategy had previously focused entirely on education and school life to tackle the issue.

Findings are presented in a way that captivates, motivates and inspires, bringing the respondents to life through short documentaries and films, created from what TEGAs have captured on their phones.

Outside data collection, being a TEGA has had a proven positive impact, giving girls living in poverty the skills to become qualified researchers, and empowering them through increased voice, visibility and connectivity.

 TEGA is still in its early stages, but it marks a new way of approaching development challenges – using technology to empower girls living in poverty to create safer, faster, more scalable and authentic research.

Laura Scanlon is director of TEGA at Girl Effect