The Drum Beat 839: Galvanising Change to End Child Marriage

• 1.Shared Roots, Different Branches: Expanding Understanding of Child Marriage in Diverse Settings
  by Relebohile Moletsane, Madhumita Das, Alessandra Guedes, and Joar Svanemyr, editors
• Globally, around 650 million girls and women alive today were married before their 18th birthday. Among the factors that place girls at risk are poverty, traditional understandings of femininities and girlhood, gender-based violence (GBV), and harmful gender norms. This open-access edition of the Journal of Adolescent Health presents research on the diverse manifestations of child, early, and forced marriage and unions (CEFMU) around the world. It examines the role CEFMU plays in controlling female bodies and regulating their sexuality. Contributions amplify diverse voices and highlight the intersections between this practice and other manifestations of gender inequality and oppression. [Mar 2022] 
   
• 2.A Social Norms Analysis of Religious Drivers of Child Marriage
  by Olivia Wilkinson, Kerida McDonald, Susanna Trotta, et al.
• Faith actors are both a force in perpetuating child marriage and a key potential ally for discouraging the harmful practice. The diagram and descriptions presented in this article bring together learning from social norms theory and religions and development research to create a framework that can be used in context analysis for interventions with faith actors on child marriage. The analysis emerges from work undertaken for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)'s Global Initiative on Faith and Positive Change for Children, Families, and Communities. [Apr 2024] 
   
• 3.Knowledge Is Power: Youth-led Research to Address Power Dynamics in Knowledge and Advocacy Processes to End Child Marriage and Promote Girls' Education in West Africa
  Published by Girls Not Brides, this report shares the findings from youth-led research on child marriage and girls' education in West Africa, which sought to support evidence-based actions while addressing power dynamics in research and advocacy processes. Recommendations shared by the 18- to 25-year-old researchers include: Make space for girls' voices to shift the discourse around social norms in child marriage and girls' education; advocate for an integrated and inclusive approach to supporting girls involved in paid and unpaid work; ensure quality, inclusive, and culturally relevant education; and safeguard internally displaced girls' rights through education in conflict settings. [Jul 2024] 
   
• 4.A Feminist Vision for Ending Child Marriage in East Africa Road Map 2023-2027
  by Janna Metzler, Monica Giufrida, Loveness Mudzuru, et al.
• In January 2021, the Women's Refugee Commission, Rozaria Memorial Trust, and King's College London launched an initiative to end child marriage with experts and practitioners from feminist, women-led, and women's rights civil society organisations (CSOs) in Eastern Africa. Recognising the urgency for action in humanitarian settings, the consortium developed a 5-year plan, outlined in this report, to meet the need for enhanced collaboration with and leadership of place-based feminist and women's rights organisations. One of the road map's key themes is the importance of driving change through collective action. [Mar 2023] 
   
• See also:
  * Changing Social Norms around Age of Marriage in Afghanistan: Data on Repression and Resistance under the Taliban 
  * Exploring the Drivers of Behaviour: The Case of Child Marriage
   

• 5.Community Action to Reduce Child Marriage in Shinyanga, Tanzania
  The Firelight Foundation believes that community-based organisations (CBOs) are well positioned to stop child marriage where it starts - in the home and in the community - by enabling normative change from the ground up. Firelight has been working with 12 CBOs to end child marriage in Shinyanga Region, Tanzania, where the rate of child marriage was 59% in 2010. This report summarises lessons learned from an independent evaluation of this work, from the assessments of CBO partners, and from Firelight, including: To support community-driven approaches, CBOs need time and support to work with their communities to think carefully about the micro and mezzo systems affecting girls' lives on a day-to-day basis and to take steps to shift those systems in meaningful ways. [Apr 2021] 
   
• 6.From 'witches' to powerful agents of change: the critical role of grandmothers
  by Judi Aubel 
• "...In years past, Grandmother Project - Change through Culture (GMP) documented the positive effects of grandmother involvement in maternal and child health programmes in Senegal, Mali, and Sierra Leone that all demonstrated grandmothers' ability to learn and to change. In southern Senegal,...[t]he involvement of grandmothers and the reaffirmation of their traditional role in communities have been found to give them the confidence to revisit old practices and to embrace new ones....[G]randmother Binta explained: 'Now we spend time with girls and discuss many things including their studies, sexuality and putting off marriage'....[R]esearch shows that grandmothers in communities that have taken part in this programme are now much more involved than grandmothers in other communities when it comes to family decisions about girls' education (87% vs 19%, respectively) and marriage (77% vs 30%)..." [Apr 2024] 
   
• 7.Tipping Point
  CARE and its partner organisations are focusing on facilitating and learning from innovative strategies to influence change-makers and root causes of child marriage in Nepal and Bangladesh, two child marriage hotspots. Methods have worked to: deepen girls', boys', parents', and community members' critical awareness of gender equity and rights and promote solidarity within peer groups; promote positive/gender-equitable norms through exemplifying and celebrating alternative behaviours; create spaces for dialogue between adolescents, parents, and other community members to promote communication, trust, and support for gender equity and rights; and encourage networks, solidarity groups, and organisations to collaborate, shift discourse, and take action to support gender-equitable opportunities for girls and boys. 
   
• 8.Preventing Child, Early, and Forced Marriage and Countering Violent Extremism in Cabo Delgado Project (Uholo-Raparigas e Jovens)
  This Mozambican project works with families, communities, school and health staff, judicial and law enforcement authorities, and policymakers to reduce CEFM by fostering economic empowerment, shifting social norms that affect girls, improving services for adolescents, and ensuring legal and policy support related to child marriage. For example, 6,120 locally led community dialogues were held on girls' education, early pregnancy and unions, sexual and reproductive health, GBV, and gender equality. These dialogues were in some cases accompanied by screenings of locally produced videos. Social Analysis and Action exercises engaged community leaders' committees and influencers to focus on girls' challenges. Funded by the United States Agency for International Development, the project was implemented from 2020 to 2024 by Pathfinder International and Ophavela. 
   
• See also:
  Break Free! Programme
   

• The Drum Beat 812 - Social Norms, Equity, and Gender
  
   

• 9.Evidence Review: Child Marriage Interventions and Research from 2020 to 2022
  by Amy Harrison
• This review looks at evidence on proven and promising interventions to prevent child marriage and support girls who are - or have been - married, divorced, separated, or widowed and/or who are young mothers, and it makes suggestions for future research, programming, funding, and policy. One finding: There is increasing evidence that a focus on girls' education can be pivotal to the success of multicomponent interventions, given its central role in preventing early marriage and its connections with other sectors - as per the socio-ecological framework. Gender-transformative approaches to education programming may have greater potential to meaningfully influence supply- and demand-side barriers to girls' education and to prevent child marriage. [Feb 2023] 
   
• 10.20 Years of the Evidence Base on What Works to Prevent Child Marriage: A Systematic Review
  by Anju Malhotra and Shatha Elnakib
• Although child marriage occurs across the globe, 90% of the burden is in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This review assesses evaluations published from 2000 to 2019 to shed light on what works, especially at scale and sustainably, to prevent child marriage in LMICs. In short, the results indicate that enhancement of girls' own human capital and opportunities is the most compelling pathway to delaying marriage. This conclusion is also supported by a high share of positive results among the few studies that assessed an exclusive focus on life skills, livelihoods, and gender rights training for girls. [Apr 2021] 
   
• 11.A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh
  by Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, et al.
• To provide empirical evidence on the possible drivers of child marriage in Bangladesh, this field experiment, conducted in collaboration with Save the Children, evaluates a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment programme. The incentive reduced child marriage by 17% overall and 19% for women aged 15 at distribution start who received the incentive for 2 years. The likelihood of being married under 16 fell by 18% among women aged 15 at distribution start. Knowledge about the incentive programme spread: 79% of untreated women in incentive communities and 25% of untreated women in non-incentive communities had heard about the incentive programme at midline. Less socially conservative women who lived close to incentive communities are 34% less likely to have married under the age of 18, compared to less socially conservative women who did not live close to an incentive community. [May 2022] 
   
• 12.Impact Data - Rope Guna Fal Radio Serial Drama
  Designed by UNICEF in partnership with Antenna Foundation Nepal, this entertaining fictional radio drama, Rope Guna Fal ("You Reap What You Sow") sought to change social norms that support child marriage, improve adolescent reproductive health, and reduce violent discipline for children. The Nepali-language series entered its second season in September 2021, this time with additional partners on board: Population Media Center-Nepal and Viamo. Listeners were 5.5 times more likely than non-listeners to intend to stop child marriage in their family and community and were 3.8 times more likely to report they'd taken actions to discourage child marriage. Rope Guna Fal resulted in an estimated 54,000 people intending to stop child marriage in their family and community. 
   
• 13.Scope, Range and Effectiveness of Interventions to Address Social Norms to Prevent and Delay Child Marriage and Empower Adolescent Girls: A Systematic Review
  by Margaret E. Greene, Jeffrey Edmeades, and Manahil Siddiqi
• This systematic review examines the scope, range, and effectiveness of interventions to change social norms and delay child marriage. The results suggest an inconsistent relationship between interventions that purport to shift norms and child marriage outcomes. These findings echo prior research showing that norm change programming has had more success in shifting individual attitudes than in shifting broader norms and related behaviours. Per the researchers, the field would do well to explore the impact of efforts to shift norms through structural interventions. They also call on the field to hold itself accountable for greater conceptual clarity, consistent implementation, and more complete and rigorous measurement of norms-change work. [Jan 2024] 
   
• 14.Impact Data - Project UMANG
  Project UMANG is a multilevel programme designed to increase school retention and reduce child marriage in Jharkhand, India. A baseline survey was conducted in both programme intervention and control areas in 2019, followed by an endline survey from December 2022 to March 2023. The proportion of girls married before the age of 18 years increased in both intervention and control areas. However, the increase was much greater in the control area (16.4 percentage points) than in the intervention area (7.4 percentage points). Also, within the intervention areas, there was a lower prevalence of child marriage (14%) among those who were exposed to UMANG activities compared to a higher prevalence (26%) among those not exposed to UMANG activities. 
   
• See also:
  Long-term Impacts of a Cash Plus Program on Marriage, Fertility, and Education after Six Years in Pastoralist Kenya: A Cluster Randomized Trial
   

• 15.How Civil Society Organisations Can Use Gender-transformative Collective Action to Address Child Marriage and Advance Girls' Rights: A 7-step Guide
  With this guide, Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage aims to catalyse more intentional gender-transformative collective action. Through 7 steps, the guide encourages workshop-based critical reflection and action planning to end child marriage by leading participants - as individuals and as a collective - through a process of critical engagement with country-level evidence and experience-sharing. The guide comes with a set of 21 tools, which are provided as amendable templates that can be adapted to a CSO collective's requirements. [May 2023] 
   
• 16.Gender-Transformative Accelerator Tool of the Global Programme to End Child Marriage
  This self-contained, process-oriented, rapid analysis and action planning tool is designed for implementers, advocates, and technical staff working on initiatives to prevent and respond to CEFMU. It was developed and field-tested by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage as part of its efforts to operationalise gender-transformative programming under Phase II (2020-2023). The aim of the tool is to facilitate interactive programmatic reflection and action planning to end child marriage. [Dec 2021] 
   
• 17.Time to Act! - Toolkit for Practitioners: Gender-Transformative Programme Strategies for Addressing Child, Early and Forced Marriage and Unions in Asia-Pacific
  This toolkit, developed by Plan International Asia-Pacific Regional Hub, is designed to serve as a practical compendium of programming guidance for practitioners and to contribute to accelerating efforts to end CEFMU by 2030. The guidance and ideas presented in the toolkit have been developed based on good practices, lessons learned, and programme evidence from the Asia-Pacific region and promote a gender-transformative, multi-sectoral, and multi-stakeholder approach to CEFMU programming. [Apr 2022] 
   
• See also:
  Khel Ek Seekh: A Handbook of Sports-based Games and Activities to Enable Facilitators to Initiate Dialogues on Gender with Adolescents and Youth
   

• 18.Leveraging United Nations Human Rights Mechanisms to End Child Marriage: A Step-by-Step Toolkit for Civil Society Organisations
  Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage developed this toolkit to facilitate CSOs' engagement with international human rights mechanisms to strengthen national advocacy strategies to end child marriage. It explores 4 key United Nations human rights mechanisms, including their linkages with child marriage, and provides resources, tips, and timelines to support advocacy. [May 2024] 
   
• 19.Toolkit: Context Analysis on Child Marriage in Crises and Forced Displacement Settings
  This toolkit provides guidance for conducting a context analysis to inform programming around child marriage in crisis or displacement settings. Developed as part of a collaboration between Plan International and the United Nations Refugee Agency, the toolkit offers guidance and practical tools to help plan, collect, and analyse data about child marriage together with adolescent girls and their communities. [Dec 2023] 
   
• 20.Guidelines for Ethical Communications around Child Marriage: Principles, Best Practice and Tools
  Created by Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage, these guidelines outline principles and practices to support ethical communication between those who have experienced or are working to end child marriage and the people who view their stories. One suggestion: Use inclusive language that speaks about the work and relationships involved in ending child marriage in a way that affirms girls', adolescents', and young women's agency and capabilities. [Sep 2022] 
   

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