My dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of the limits of girls’ empowerment discourses guiding education and development policies and programs in Sierra Leone, with implications for broader geographical contexts. In recent years, Sierra Leone has reemerged as a regional and global “success story” of education and gender inclusion with the introduction of the 2018 Free Quality School Education (FQSE) Program. The FQSE extended tuition-free education to the senior secondary level for the first time and emphasized the “radical inclusion” of girls in schools as a key pathway to achieving middle-income status and national development. Considering that school fees are one of the most significant barriers to education for young women in Sierra Leone and elsewhere across Africa, this study asks: How, if at all, has expanding access to tuition-free secondary schooling empowered young women in Sierra Leone? Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic data collection, nearly 90 interviews, focus group discussions, policy document analysis as well as teaching in government secondary schools in the capital of Freetown and the large town of Makeni, I argue that while tuition-free education has increased secondary school enrollment for both young women and young men, educational access has done little to combat gender biases and transform existing patriarchal structures in schools and communities in Sierra Leone. Secondary schoolgirls faced sexual and gender-based violence, teenage pregnancies, domestic abuse, and unemployment and were excluded from social and political life due to gender discrimination in schools and society. Yet young women showed agency in collectively navigating these challenges by building what I conceptualize as schoolgirl peer-support networks and with support from a select few teachers and principals who were committed to gender equity. My dissertation demonstrated that while access to schooling alone did not transform the structural conditions that marginalized young women in Sierra Leone, secondary schools were one of the few spaces for young women to participate in public life and were important sites for secondary schoolgirls to imagine new possibilities for their futures.