Girls Parliament to end child marriage in Uganda

Right now, there are 650 million child brides living in every region of the world. Child marriage is a fundamental violation of human rights, which severely impacts the global economy, peace and security, as well as hampering the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Poverty, fragility, unjust legal systems and harmful social norms and traditions are among the many factors that support its ongoing practice. Even in countries with laws intended to protect children from marrying before their 18th birthday, social and cultural norms supporting child marriage still exist and undermine any national laws.

In recent years child marriage has gained increasing importance in international and national development agendas. 

Today, we have a unique opportunity to act on this momentum and accelerate the change.

Ending child marriage is not easy: it requires work across all sectors and at all levels. We must be able to understand the complex drivers behind the practice in different contexts and adapt our programs and measures accordingly. 

Fighting child marriage requires well targeted financial resources and knowing how to invest them with programs that can vary from community to community.

We are on the field everyday, living side by side with families and young women: this is one of our strengths as it gives us the opportunity to allocate the resources in the best possible way to achieve better results.

Progress has been made over the last decade – an estimated 25 million child marriages were prevented – but there is still much more work to be done. Global projections of girls married by 2030 have shot up from 100 million to 110 million, based on the current estimates that an additional 10 million girls will now be married due to the COVID 19 outbreak. 

 From the collected stories, data and research, seven key themes emerged:

1. Integrating specific actions to end child marriage from the outset of a humanitarian response is critical to sustaining global progress. Designing or adapting existing intervention models to reduce crisis-induced risks and ensure service provision continues will strengthen the impact of response and ensures continuity of existing efforts.

2. Empowering women and girls as key decision-makers and agents of change achieves long-lasting results. Giving women and girls a voice in all aspects of project design and implementation is essential for the success of ending-child marriage programming.

3. Engaging men and boys provides greater support structures for girls to say “no” to child marriage. Widespread global gender inequality means that men and boys hold greater social power and are often the ones who decide whether a child should be married. It is important to work with men and boys, alongside women and girls, to effectively end the practice of child marriage.

4. Involving faith leaders is critical for long-term cultural and social norm change. Faith leaders are respected messengers in their communities who uniquely influence social norms. By engaging local community and faith leaders, programming to end child marriage can have a broader and lasting impact.

5. Child marriage is driven by varied and complex factors that require multisectoral solutions, delivered through strong child protection systems. The seven evidence-based INSPIRE strategies provide a set of guidelines to holistically address factors leading to violence against children, including child marriage.3 When integrated and contextualised, these strategies effectively contribute towards reducing and ending child marriage.

6. Education provides alternative pathways and increased opportunities for girls at risk of child marriage. Interventions to end child marriage should be coupled with the strengthening of education programmes and capacity-building of local schools.

7. Community-led social accountability mechanisms are vital to ending child marriage. Providing avenues for advocacy is key to transformation and service delivery. National- and local-level advocacy are effective in a variety of contexts and can help state-society accountability and development coordination to end child marriage.