Post-2015 Toolkit: Make Ending Child, Early and Forced Marriage a Global Priority

From Girls Not Brides, a partnership of over 400 organisations from more than 60 countries around the world, this resource is designed to support the work of advocates who are in a position to "engage in a process that will likely drive international attention and development programming and funding for the next 15 years." The context: "Child, early and forced marriage and the needs of adolescent girls were notably missing from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which directly hindered the achievement of six of the eight MDGs. We must act now to ensure that child, early and forced marriage is included in the new development framework." As explained here, negotiations will continue throughout the first half of 2015, until the adoption of the final framework at a high-level post-2015 summit from September 25-27 2015; the President of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly will hold 3 thematic debates and high-level events throughout 2016.

Following a glossary and list of key terms, the resource provides advocates with:

1. "Introduction
2. Background on the post-2015 development framework
3. Child, early and forced marriage in the post-2015 development framework
4. Developing a child, early and forced marriage advocacy strategy for the post-2015 development framework
   • What is advocacy?
   • Define your advocacy objective
   • Understanding the national policy context
   • Table of government commitments
   • Identify and understand your primary target audience
   • Identify secondary target audiences
   • Develop your advocacy messages
   • Identify opportunities and activities for delivering messages
   • Graphic: sample influence map
   • Developing your advocacy plan
   • Worksheet 1: developing an advocacy strategy step-by-step
5. Working in partnership
6. What is lobbying and how to lobby
   • Worksheet 2: lobby log
7. Media and communications
8. Resources"

Throughout the resource, several specific tips for strengthening practice are included. For example: "The first step in advocacy planning is to be very clear about the policy change you want to see. While we are all working together to end child, early and forced marriage and support married girls, our common post-2015 advocacy objective is for a strong target to end child, early and forced marriage to be included in the post-2015 development framework under a gender equality goal. To achieve this, we know that it will be particularly important for a wide range of governments...to speak out in support of the target....[A]t the country level, your advocacy objectives will be more specific.....For example, you may know that your government has written policy guidance to their negotiators on their post-2015 positions, but that this document does not include child, early and forced marriage. You then might advocate for the inclusion of child, early and forced marriage in this document. What if your government officially supports inclusion of the child, early and forced marriage target, but has not spoken out formally in negotiations in support of it? You could advocate for them to make public statements during the thematic debates and in any speeches on post-2015, or in regional or international fora like the African Union (AU), South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), Southern African Development Community (SADC), etc. If your government is already on record supporting the target, you could encourage them to become a champion and ask other governments to support it, or convince other members in their regional bloc to adopt a common position."