Care in translation: girls, responsibilities, and local leadership in Southern Bahia

After years of limited impact and perceptions that its programs were externally imposed and reflected a north–south bias, the NGO where Marjorie conducted fieldwork in Southern Bahia sought local leadership to strengthen its community connections. Jacqueline, who grew up in the neighbourhood, assumed this role and reshaped the organization's workshops. This paper examines how her interpersonal skills and situated knowledge of local girls' lives enabled an intervention that foregrounded their otherwise invisible daily responsibilities, care practices and encounters with violence. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork involving participation in community activities and volunteering with the NGO, we analyse these experiences through the concepts of landscapes of care and caring scapes, situating girls' responsibilities within spatial and temporal dynamics of inequality and community support. Rather than pathologizing or romanticizing their roles, we show how these practices constitute relational agency: although constrained by structural conditions, they create possibilities for decision-making and participation. We argue that the NGO's reconfigured activities show how local leadership can translate global intervention models into situated practices that acknowledge and expand children's agency. The case demonstrates that empowerment emerges not from abstract notions of autonomy, but through relational and interdependent forms of care embedded in everyday life.