Time to Act - Let's Go Digital!: Using Digital Technology to End Child, Early and Forced Marriage and Reduce Adolescent Pregnancy

"The need to address child, early, and forced marriages (CEFM) with innovative, sustainable, and impactful solutions has never been greater."

This report, published by Plan International, examines the role that digital technologies and online solutions can play in preventing, reducing, and eliminating CEFM in the Asia-Pacific region. Based on an in-depth literature review and key informant interviews, it examines the ways in which Plan International Asia-Pacific Regional Hub (APAC) and other child-rights based development organisations have integrated digital technologies in their programmatic and influencing approaches towards ending CEFM in the region. The report shares key insights, including challenges, and offers recommendations on how organisations working to end CEFM can more effectively leverage digital technologies to reach scale and generate impact. 

As explained in the report, "The term digital technologies is encompassing and typically includes the devices and applications that generate, store, and process data and/or facilitate communications. The effective functioning of digital technologies is enabled by digital infrastructure, which provides an essential backbone for connectivity." The research included different approaches to leveraging digital technologies to prevent, reduce, and eliminate CEFM. Because knowledge and understanding of the relationship between digital technologies and CEFM is limited, the literature review also mapped digital technologies that could positively impact CEFM elimination efforts, even if they were not explicitly designed to do so. This includes digital solutions that: increase girls' access to quality education and keep girls in school longer; promote digital spaces where girls can learn and acquire new income-generating skills to achieve financial independence; link girls to income-generating activities and stimulate youth economic empowerment; engage young girls and boys in personalised learning experiences where their unique learning needs are met; ensure that girls are protected from violence; and ensure that girls have access to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).   
The report presents the main findings and key learning points from the research (which was conducted from November 2020 to March 2021) as 24 insights, grouped under six overarching themes: CEFM elimination efforts, design, scale, benefits, impact, and challenges. It also provides case studies of where digital technologies have been integrated within Plan International APAC's programming and influencing work. In brief, these insights are: 

CEFM elimination
1. Plan International APAC is integrating several digital technologies into CEFM elimination programming. 
2. Digital technologies were positioned as enablers to CEFM elimination efforts.
3. Promising practices are emerging from development organisations leveraging digital technologies in their CEFM elimination efforts.
4. Digital technologies can positively impact CEFM elimination efforts, even if they are not specifically designed to do so. 

Design
5. In some countries, development organisations deploy a user-centric design process.
6. Several organisations considered gender in their user-centric design process.
7. Numerous organisations made efforts to clearly define their intended users.
8. The principles for digital development inform technology development processes in some Plan International APAC Country Offices.
9. Partnerships are critical to develop effective and scalable digital technologies.

Scale
10. Digital technologies can help reach priority audiences at scale.
11. Open-source technology solutions support cost-effective scaling efforts.
12. Efforts at scaling digital technologies across countries require rigorous localisation. 

Benefits
13. Digital technologies became critical for programme continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
14. Digital technologies provided girls and young women with opportunities to network during the COVID-19 pandemic.
15. Digital technologies offer girls and young women anonymity.
16. Digital technologies can facilitate cost-effective research efforts.

Impact
17. Impact evidence on how digital technologies affect CEFM elimination outcomes remains scarce.
18. In some instances, stakeholders defined in advance how they expected digital technologies to affect CEFM outcomes.
19. There is emerging evidence that digital technologies support real-world impact.

Challenges
20. Access to digital technologies remains a challenge for some girls and young women.
21. While there are access challenges for girls and young women, these can be overcome.
22. Digital technology initiatives face sustainability challenges.
23. Digital technology initiatives also face resourcing challenges.
24. Potential and actual harms inflicted through use of digital technology remain a key concern. 

Examples highlighted include one from Bangladesh, where Plan International developed an open-source digital civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) solution that is free to use, adaptable to different country contexts, interoperable with other government systems (e.g., health and ID systems), and rights-based to ensure it protects and provides for the most vulnerable. These systems record the details of all major life events in a country, such as births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and adoptions - all information that can play an important role in ensuring children are vaccinated, educated, and protected from exploitation, including CEFM. In Timor East, Plan International, in partnership with Marie Stopes, developed Reproductiva, a mobile application that provides girls and young women a safe and confidential space to gain valuable and relevant information about their sexual and reproductive health in real time. Because unexpected pregnancy is often a driver of CEFM, efforts to tackle CEFM must also address the lack of knowledge and understanding of SRHR.

Drawing on these insights, the report offers a series of recommendations about how development actors, governments, and donors working to prevent, reduce, and eliminate CEFM can most effectively leverage digital technologies to reach scale and generate impact. 

Over-arching recommendation: Plan for scale
Many CEFM programmes are most successful at the local level, where their strategies are deeply tied to individual change-makers and community values and norms. Replicating these successful programmes at scale has been a challenge for practitioners. One of the key value-adds that digital solutions bring to CEFM elimination efforts is new opportunities to tackle this challenge.

• Reuse and improve existing digital technologies: Look for ways to adapt and enhance existing digital solutions instead of developing new ones from scratch. This approach can help an organisation avoid resource-intensive technology development and increase the chance that the technology will scale and generate the intended impact.
• Optimise the user-centric design process: Digital technologies can offer many benefits to CEFM elimination programming, but an effective process is needed to determine precisely what digital technology could be most effective and how best to design the technology to suit both the user and the context. 
• Articulate the problem before choosing the digital technology: A well-articulated problem can help guide the selection or development of a digital technology. It can also help in the early articulation of impact, which might also affect how the technology is adapted or designed.
• Expand the base of partnerships: There is a broad range of technologies that can have a positive impact on CEFM elimination efforts. Identifying these solutions and forming the right partnerships to adapt, develop, and scale these technologies is recommended in order to optimise impact and increase the sustainability of technology-enabled efforts. The private sector in particular should engage more on CEFM prevention and elimination. After all, CEFM is not only a child rights violation, but it also decreases the number of future leaders, innovators, and inventors in the workforce of tomorrow.
• Define and track the impact of digital technology efforts: Clearly defining impact objectives at the beginning of the technology development process can improve the design of the technology and more effectively align it to generate the intended impact. Regularly tracking these objectives is also important to understand how technologies are affecting key priority groups. Digital harms or unintended consequences of usage must also be tracked and addressed.
• Allocate separate budgets for digital technology efforts: Separate budgets can help to ensure that digital technology efforts always have the resources required to effectively develop, scale, and generate impact. 
• Develop a strategy for sustainability: A sustainability strategy can increase the chance that the technology will continue to generate impact even after donor-funded programming ends. Finding the right partners and effectively aligning objectives and incentives is critical to sustainability planning. 
   

The final section of the report provides an overview of how Plan International is contributing more broadly to the elimination of CEFM in the Asia-Pacific region. It describes in detail the programmatic and influencing approaches used in these efforts - such as the gender-transformative approach and the Global 18+ Theory of Change - and outlines some of the organisation's work in 10 countries where CEFM elimination efforts are ongoing. This work includes four "flagship" projects that demonstrate promising practices and show strong potential for scale-up and long-term sustainability. They are: Building Better Futures for Girls in Bangladesh; Girls Advocacy Alliance in India; Yes I Do in Indonesia; and EMPoWR in Vietnam.  

Click here for the 8-page executive summary in PDF format.