Girls Not Brides: Partnership to End Child Marriage

Summary

In 2011, the Elders, the Ford Foundation, the Nike Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation committed to jointly establish ‘Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage’ (Girls not Brides). Girls Not Brides is a member-driven partnership with a global focus. They also committed to raise $3 million to ensure the functioning of the partnership, the creation of a secretariat, and to seed activities to end child marriage in priority countries. In addition, they committed to establish a network of donors to support programs to end child marriage worldwide.

Approach

APPROACH AND METHODOLOGY
Members of Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage will work together to enhance and strengthen efforts to end child marriage at community, local, national and global levels. Girls Not Brides will develop strategies to empower girls and local champions to raise their voice against child marriage. It will raise awareness of the harmful impact of child marriage by encouraging open, inclusive and informed discussions; facilitate learning and coordination between organizations working to end child marriage; and mobilize all necessary policy, financial and other support to end child marriage.
Girls Not Brides will also advocate for other actors – including governments, international multilateral organizations, donor and aid agencies, and research institutions – to join the global movement against child marriage.
IMPLEMENTATION, TIMELINE, AND DELIVERABLES
The implementation of this commitment will start with the creation of a support office for Girls Not Brides, by December 2011. The team will be headed by an international coordinator and will be initially hosted in the offices of The Elders in London, UK.
Efforts to enlist new members will continue throughout the period, with the aim to reach a membership of at least 150 organizations running programs in at least 20 countries by December 2012.
Potential members for Girls Not Brides will be identified and approached through: previous and ongoing research on organizations that work to end child marriage or are interested in engaging in this field, and use of the members’ networks.
In December 2011, a regional meeting of Girls Not Brides members will be organized in India. The members will be asked to share information about their activities, good practices and lessons learned. They will commit to work together to develop policy and communications strategies that will allow the partnership to promote better awareness of child marriage and develop better programs to address it at all levels.
On the basis of these strategic policy and communications plans, members of Girls Not Brides will advocate for donors, aid agencies, international NGOS and international multilateral organizations to increase their investment to end child marriage. Drawing on the particular strengths of individual member organizations, Girls Not Brides will use private advocacy, public campaigns, mobilization of traditional, cultural, religious and political leaders and targeted media work. Governments in at least ten of 25 high-prevalence countries will be urged to enact and effectively implement laws against child marriage. Research institutions will be encouraged to collect quality data on the circumstances of child marriage in at least ten of 25 high-prevalence countries.

Background

Child marriage is a marriage under the law or a customary union in which at least one of the spouses is a child, i.e. a person below the age of 18 (as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child). It is a harmful traditional practice that affects millions of children, predominantly girls, every year. In the developing world, 1 in 3 girls is married before she turns 18 (UNICEF). Change is happening, but too slowly: at the current rate, 100 million more girls will become child brides in the next decade – that is about 10 million each year (Population Council).
Child marriage is a violation of girls’ human rights, including the rights to life, liberty, self-determination and health. Child marriage puts these girls at great risk of disease, injury and death during early sexual activity and childbearing. In 2007, UNICEF reported that a girl under the age of 15 is five times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than a woman in her 20s. Child brides are also at much higher risk of pregnancy-related injuries such as fistula.
The negative consequences of child marriage directly hinder the achievement of six of the eight Millennium Development Goals. Child marriage usually marks the end of girls’ schooling. Adolescent girls have dramatically higher maternal mortality than their slightly older counterparts. The babies of adolescent mothers are much more likely to die than infants born to women ages 20 and older. Child marriage increases girls’ exposure to HIV, and as a consequence of their physical immaturity, an additional 100,000 girls each year live with the disability of fistula resulting from obstructed labor (UN, 2008). Young wives’ low status in their marital households condemns them to long hours of drudgery, social isolation, greater risks of physical or sexual violence, and very little say over anything that affects them (Garcia-Moreno et al 2005). The children of young and poorly educated girls tend to do less well in school and to have lower earnings as adults, contributing to the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next. Without a strong strategy to end child marriage, it will be impossible to successfully realize the MDGs.

Progress Update

July 2013
Girls Not Brides has grown to a partnership of over 270 organisations working in over 50 countries worldwide, ranging from grass-roots organisations to large international NGOs. It is supported by a fully functional secretariat which facilitates, coordinates and supports the work of Girls Not Brides member organisations. The CGI commitment was to set up the partnership, which will continue to grow in the coming years. During the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative meeting, Bill Clinton highlighted the progress made by Girls Not Brides, recognising that the growth of the partnership significantly exceeded the pledges made when it was launched.
Since its initiation, the partnership has focused on both raising awareness about the urgent need to address child marriage, and on supporting members in learning from each other’s experiences and successes, including through convening two large regional meetings of members. Increased attention to the issue was particularly notable around the first International Day of the Girl Child (11 October 2012), which focused on child marriage.
The partnership has also worked towards mobilising policy, financial and programme support to end child marriage and has seen a dramatic increase in international attention to the issue of child marriage since its initiation, with new commitments from long-standing supporters as well as new actors keen to join the growing global movement to end child marriage. For example, on the first International Day of the Girl Child, UNFPA committed $20 million to child marriage programming, and the Ford Foundation launched a 5 year $25 million commitment to work with NGOs, governments, local communities and other funders to build the political will necessary to end child marriage, to support new research to determine successful interventions, and to expand girls’ access to resources and rights, including the right not to marry early.
Child marriage has also received high-level recognition by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, and has been discussed at the UN, World Health Assembly, the Human Rights Council, G8 Foreign Ministers’ meetings and the Commission on the Status of Women in March 2013, as well as in a number of national governments. The issue is also increasingly being mentioned in formal and informal debates about the post-2015 development framework.

Partnership Opportunities

SEEKING: Financial Resources, Implementing Partners, Best Practice Information, Media/Marketing Opportunities
Girls Not Brides is seeking financial resources for its own development and to support programs aiming to end child marriage. Organizations that already implement programs to end child marriage, or plan to do so, are welcome to become members of the Partnership. Girls Not Brides is a place of exchange of knowledge and best practices on innovative ways to address child marriage in different settings – any partners offering or seeking such information would be most welcome. Girls Not Brides is seeking media partners to raise the visibility of child marriage, and marketing partners to help develop and implement the communications strategy.
Girls Not Brides is seeking financial resources for its own development and to support programs aiming to end child marriage. Organizations that already implement programs to end child marriage, or plan to do so, are welcome to become members of the Partnership. Girls Not Brides is a place of exchange of knowledge and best practices on innovative ways to address child marriage in different settings – any partners offering or seeking such information would be most welcome. Girls Not Brides is seeking media partners to raise the visibility of child marriage, and marketing partners to help develop and implement the communications strategy.