Taking Action to Address Child Marriage: The Role of Different Sectors

Developed by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) in collaboration with Girls Not Brides, this series of 10 briefs provides a short, accessible introduction to incorporating and measuring child marriage prevention and response throughout the programme lifecycle within a variety of sectoral and cross-sectoral programming. The overview brief and accompanying sector briefs are intended to serve as quick, go-to resources for a broad audience and may be of particular use during the needs assessment and programme design stages.

The resources are intended for those working in and across education; global health; gender-based violence; youth programming; democracy, human rights, and governance; economic growth and workforce development; conflict and humanitarian crisis; agriculture, energy, and the environment; and food security and nutrition. The idea is that integrating child marriage prevention and response across many sectors and into existing efforts can both accelerate efforts to end this harmful practice and better meet the needs of girls and women, while contributing to the achievement of existing sector-specific goals.

The 9 briefs, each 4 pages in length, outline the ways in which child marriage is relevant to programmes across diverse sectors and highlight promising strategies and examples being used around the world to address child marriage. They also provide recommendations for how these strategies can be adapted to end child marriage worldwide.

The 12-page overview brief provides a brief background on child marriage, calling it a violation of human rights, as well as a barrier to social, economic, and political development. It is described as negatively affecting the health of girls and their future families by: contributing to early sexual activity, pregnancy, and childbearing; limiting girls' chances of staying in school and gaining information, skills, and support networks; increasing their exposure to physical, sexual, and emotional violence; and restricting their agency, mobility, and decision-making power.

As is explored in the overview brief, attention and investment have focused increasingly on interlinked programmes that aim to prevent and respond to child marriage by incorporating efforts at the individual, family/community, and institutional levels. Girls Not Brides has developed a Child Marriage Theory of Change [PDF] that lays out the critical pathways and strategies needed at multiple levels. Some effective programmes directly equip both married and unmarried girls with skills and information, increase their access to resources, and build their agency, while others shift broader social norms related to marriage formation and gender equality, including through working with parents, community leaders, and boys. To make greater progress on child marriage, however, ICRW and Girls Not Brides contend that greater focus needs to be placed on incorporating programming messages, activities, and structures that directly target the context-specific drivers of child marriage. For example:

• Engaging with religious leaders who provide traditional marriage ceremonies;
• Working to change attitudes about child marriage among boys ("future husbands") and family members (fathers, brothers, mothers, aunts) who conduct marriage negotiations or advise girls about marriage; and
• Addressing social norms or economic constraints that put pressure on families to marry their daughters early.

The overview brief also offers broadly applicable guidance for child marriage integration throughout the programme cycle, the steps of which include:

1. A needs assessment, which can provide a good understanding of the role of child marriage - its prevalence, causes and effects, and relationships with other programme focuses - in a particular programmatic context.
2. Project design, which should be informed by the findings of the needs assessment, including a strong theory of change, programme activities, and implementation and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plans.
3. Project development to appropriately select and reach beneficiaries and audiences, outline an action plan, and identify and account for potential barriers and facilitators to the project's success.
4. Programme implementation and monitoring throughout the intervention to ensure that the programme is achieving its intended effects, reaching its intended beneficiaries, and making adjustments along the way. (This may involve use of surveys to monitor shifts in attitudes and behaviours related to child marriage, such as attitudes about the value of girls, educational attainment, health outcomes, participation in income-generating activities, and incidence of gender-based violence, or GBV).
5. An evaluation, which - in addition to the sector-specific outcomes of interest - should measure changes in broader gender norms.
6. Project redesign and re-planning shaped by findings from the evaluation, which should also involve the dissemination of findings to the broader field.

The tables on pages 8-11 of the overview brief provide essential prevalence indicators that capture the scale of child marriage in a particular country or region, as well as general child marriage indicators at the individual level, family and community level, and institutional level. Collecting data related to these indicators can enable implementers to: understand the different circumstances various groups of individuals face; see how the programme affects various groups of participants in different ways; track their progress; adjust programming for greater impact; compare the effects of their programme to that of other programmes; communicate impact; and attract funding.

Finally, the overview brief provides a list of some key resources for donors, implementers, and advocates seeking more information regarding child marriage background, programming, and measurement.