An in-depth examination and critique of girls’ empowerment campaigns in Uganda.

In Kampala, Uganda’s capital and largest city, to “detooth” is to take a man’s money with promises of sex and intimacy.  In this highly engaging book, anthropologist Erin V. Moore uses detoothing as a metaphor to capture the ways that many in Uganda, where unemployment rates are staggering, get access to resources from prosperous international NGOs. 

Based on over a decade of ethnographic research in Uganda, Canada, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, the United States, and at the United Nations, Development Detoothed focuses on the world’s largest campaign to “empower” adolescent girls in the global south, which aimed to reach hundreds of millions of girls. Moore follows the campaign’s money and messages around the world, through what she calls the “development supply chain,” from NGO headquarters to staff training workshops, UN offices, government agencies, and community-based organizations.

From this uniquely multisited perspective, she explains how billions of aid dollars earmarked for girls ended up in the hands of men who ran these organizations. Rather than merely document ironic outcomes, however, Moore shows how people inventively navigated the development industry’s many injustices, arguing that as young Ugandan women pull development’s “teeth” they effectively challenge broader ideas about power, money, and masculinity.