It’s hard to navigate being a teenager – and even harder when juggling multiple identities and cultural expectations. At Ordinary Differences, we specialise in gender-related issues. For this project, our goal was to explore the psychological and social challenges Congolese teenage girls face when attempting to integrate into their host country – in this case, South Africa.

In 2021, we followed a group of refugee teenagers, aged 13 to 17, over a period of three months, using digital ethnography in order to hear and see through their eyes their experiences – of juggling multiple identities, expectations and pressures, all while navigating adolescence.

When you look at the media, the representation of female refugees is often the same – they are depicted as passive victims of their circumstances. Their voices aren’t heard, and the diversity of their experiences is not being brought to life. We wanted to address this lack of agency and showcase a totally different (and unexpected) side that shatters stereotypical representations of female refugees. Specifically, teenage girl refugees.

What we found were confident, determined and ambitious teenage girls wanting to be heard. They are smart, they go to school, they study like crazy, and they have loads of different interests. They are obsessed with K-pop and South Korean TV shows. They talk about crushes, share videos on TikTok and think Facebook is for old, boring people. This is not your stereotypical image of a refugee girl that the media often portrays.

They are certainly not passive. Far from it. They want to shape and own their future. They want to overcome the obstacles standing in their way. One of the hardest parts of being a refugee is the lack of identity. This can even make their everyday life seem impossible: for example, some of them cannot sit their final, end-of-school exams because they do not have the correct paperwork. No final exams, no university, no opportunity to follow their dreams. But it also raises questions about their own, individual identity. If they aren’t deemed to be Congolese, as they have never been there and don’t speak the language, and yet are also not South African because they are ‘different’, what does this mean? Who are they? This is a question they grapple with every day.

We heard about the bullying they experience at school because they are ‘different’. Told that they are not African. That they are too black. And language is used as a weapon, as a tool for exclusion. One of the girls says she feels like an outsider because she can’t speak Zulu, so she’s powerless to understand what they are saying about her, both behind her back and often right in front of her.

These are just some of the examples of what life is like for them – but they aren’t defeated. They rise and continue to shape their future, despite these setbacks. The girls loved having someone listen to them; hear their dreams, but also their frustrations. It gave them the confidence to speak out and to be heard. Now the sky is the limit, and who knows – one day they might even become researchers.

This project was led by the girls. It was raw, direct and in the moment; rather than the girls reflecting retrospectively, we were able to generate feedback as and when it was happening. They ended up telling us about the world through their eyes. This wasn’t done with fancy apps or software; this wasn’t done spending huge amounts of money or with a prescriptive discussion guide – this was done to turn an over-thought research process on its head, to just reach out to girls.

Thanks to digital accessible tools, we conducted an agile piece of research, and we did it in a way that brought the girls’ story to life. They are inspiring young girls, and we look forward to seeing what life brings them as we continue to listen to their stories.

Amélie Truffert is partner and Rhonda Nicholl associate director at Ordinary Differences

This article is from the July 2022 edition of Impact magazine.