In the Middle East and North Africa, the social status of women is associated not only with gender equality, but also with national development policies that are often characterized as ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ (Hasso, 2009). While development remains multi-faceted, education is widely understood to play a key role in promoting gender equality and economic empowerment. However, since the birth of the Education for All movement, much of the prevailing literature concerning girls’ education in Egypt focused primarily on educational access and not gender equality. In Egypt, early-marriage is implicated as one of the main barriers to educational access for girls living in rural areas. For decades, delaying marriage and reducing fertility rates among women in the global south has been instrumental in increasing educational access for girls and women (Johnson-Hanks, 2006). Policy makers have since developed interventions that increased school enrollment among girls (Assaad, Levison, & Zibani, 2010). Most notably the Girls’ Education Initiative Egypt (GEIE), a partnership between the United Nations and the Egyptian government. The objective of this paper is to analyze the GEIE in the context of one particular educational intervention its efforts produced, the Ishraq (Enlightenment) program. Informed by a critical poststructural conceptual framework and through the use of ethnographic research methods, this case study examines the interplay between transnational development discourse and the ways in which former Ishraq participants engage in the social contests concerning marriage and education. Preliminary analysis of the findings suggests the GEIE and Ishraq reports tend to link program completion and delaying marriage to an increase in ‘empowerment’ for participants. These narrow characterizations are in large part not grounded in the expressed understandings of many former participants and even some Ishraq program officers. Research findings are based on discourse analysis as well as analysis of primary data collected between 2013 and 2014. This data consists of daily observations, informal conversations, and semi-structured and informal interviews with select policy makers, program staff, and randomly selected former Ishraq participants. A focus on educational access alone falls short of addressing the various structural and contextual constraints women and girls in Egypt face on a daily basis. Additionally, particular claims to knowledge and truth regarding the relationship between marriage and girls’ education help sustain certain configurations of power transnationally, nationally, and locally. As a result women’s lives, bodies, and public visibility are important sites where discourses of development, nation, and modernity operate.