Abstract
AbstractThis article demonstrates how female students in rural Uganda experience education sponsorship in ways that belie international development discourse about girls’ empowerment. Since the 1990s, international development organizations have promoted community‐based programming alongside efforts to empower individual subjects. I examine the intersection of these trends through the lens of an American nongovernmental organization's (NGO) scholarship program in a Ugandan village. Drawing from recent work on the politics of potentiality, I argue three nested points: (1) NGOs and the various groups that interact with them construct the community as a site for intervention; (2) notions of potential are key to these constructions; and (3) the community–potential nexus is gendered in ways that reconfigure young women's networks of support and obligation with kin, local leaders, and NGO staff. This analysis illuminates larger tensions surrounding notions of individual autonomy and community obligation in Uganda and rural sub‐Saharan Africa more broadly.
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