12 Million Girls a Year: Behind a New Grassroots Push to End Child Marriage
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Two girls in manang, Nepal. Oleskaus/shutterstock
Teen girls who do not marry in childhood are more likely to live longer, go to school, work and have more money, choose when and if to have children, avoid child mortality and be free of domestic abuse and health issues. All of these outcomes also positively impact their communities, countries and future generations.
But about 650 million girls and women alive today were married before they were 18, and about 12 million more are married each year, which equals about 23 girls per minute. The Ford Foundation, NoVo Foundation, Kendeda Fund, Gates Foundation and others have made efforts in the past to address the mammoth issue of child marriage, which spans cultures and has been especially widespread in the Global South.
A new funding collaborative, the Girls First Fund (GFF), aims to bring unprecedented financial support and attention to girl- and women-centered grassroots, community-based organizations (COBs) taking on this problem around the globe. The fund’s key partners include the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), Echidna Giving, Ford, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Foundation for a Just Society (FJS), NoVo, Kendeda, Nationale Postcode Loterij, an anonymous supporter, VOW to End Child Marriage, Girls Not Brides, Capital for Good, which houses and disperses grants for the fund, and Geneva Global, which provides various philanthropic consulting services. Ford and NoVo were among the initial founders of Girls Not Brides, and several other GFF donor partners have supported this global network of more than 1300 civil society organizations.
GFF is in the midst of a learning period between 2019 and 2020, during which it has granted about $3 million to 150 groups in six countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, India, Nepal, Niger and Uganda. “Early and forced marriage is a gross human rights violation that makes it nearly impossible for girls and women to live healthy lives and realize their aspirations,” Tamara Kreinin, director of Packard’s population and reproductive health program, says.
Many child marriages and unions are informal and/or unreported. And while not a focus of this fund, child marriage also affects girls in the U.S., as well as boys around the world. Recorded child marriage rates fell between 2008 and 2018, from about 25% of the world’s young women to 21%, due in part to reductions in the practice in South Asia and Ethiopia. But no region is currently on track to meet the Sustainable Development Goal of eliminating the practice altogether by 2030.
Funders Unite to take on an Entrenched Practice
Princess Mabel van Oranje of the Netherlands, an active human rights advocate and chair of Girls Not Brides, came up with the idea for GFF in collaboration with CIFF CEO Kate Hampton and Ford President Darren Walker. According to CIFF Director for Girl Capital Manjula Singh, these three “wrote letters to philanthropies that shared our conviction, and we founded the organization together, convening grantmakers with sometimes very different approaches, but lots to contribute.”
In identifying and developing relationships with GFF’s current 100+ grantees, Singh of CIFF says they have “taken on a challenge that [no] organization could have achieved alone.”
GFF focuses not only on changing the legal age of marriage, but addressing the underlying cultural beliefs and rigid gender norms that limit girls’ freedoms and equity. This is a systemic approach many of its donor partners already embrace. Jody Myrum, director of NoVo’s Advancing Adolescent Girls Rights initiative, says NoVo holds “a deep belief that if we do not address patriarchy at the very root, we will only ever be addressing the symptoms of a much bigger problem.”
Dena Kimball, Kendeda Fund executive director and fund adviser for its Girls Rights program, says she has learned that child marriage connects to other issues Kendeda works with, like climate insecurity and the resulting “economic dislocation.” She also says it’s important not to define child marriage as the result of one isolated factor, such as poverty. “If we consider child marriage to be a product of deeper systemic issues [like] patriarchy and the devaluing of girls, then the responses [must] be more holistic,” she says, adding that this type of response is GFF’s goal. The fund states child marriage can be fueled by factors like poverty, teen pregnancy, and concepts of family honor, but is “primarily driven by ideas of girls’ inferiority and linked to a desire to control [their] fertility, sexuality and freedom.”
A report called “Feminine Norms” from the nonprofit True Child frames child marriage as one practice among a constellation of related behaviors, including genital cutting and trafficking, that are connected to restrictive gender concepts. TrueChild founder Riki Wilchins says helping young people examine gender norms is “a crucial and overlooked” part of “improving their sense of agency.” She says it’s particularly important for young women who are taught the “three Ds” of traditional femininity—“being deferential, desirable and dependent, [especially in] small villages or towns where they are always under an adult eye and have almost no privacy or individual agency.”
Walker explains Ford works to stop child marriage because “reducing inequality in all its forms is at the center of everything we do… We see gender inequality and child marriage as inextricably linked—as two sides of the same coin. So if we want to reduce gender inequality, we have to work to reduce violence against women and girls, and this includes the practice of child marriage globally.”
Along with philanthropies and nonprofits, the fund has a unique fundraising entity as a partner: VOW. VOW is an organization that engages the $100 billion-a-year U.S. wedding industry in ending child marriage. It raises money through public donations and the sale of branded wedding products in partnership with major retailers and sites and gives all donations to the Girls First Fund. It is fiscally sponsored by the Give Lively Foundation and funded by Ford. Girls Not Brides is one of its partners. VOW was founded by Princess van Oranje. When the campaign launched in 2018, she told Reuters, “Couples and companies can help to make sure that, somewhere else in the world, a girl who’s not yet ready to get married can say, ‘I don’t.’”
Grants to Give Women and Girls a Better Life
GFF supports local groups led by and involving girls and women, and it offers flexible, long-term support. Over 90% of the organizations first selected for funding are women-led, 90% work on changing social norms, and 40% are receiving international funding for the first time.
GFF created an accessible application process in order to welcome all kinds and sizes of groups with members at all levels of English proficiency. Interested organizations were able to apply through online, phone-based, handwritten, audio or video methods, and the fund placed advisers in each country to help as needed. In three of the six countries, panels of local experts working in the realm of child marriage helped review grantees. In one case, the panel was made up of girls and young women, mirroring the youth-inclusive participatory grantmaking approach of the With and For Girls Collective.
Fanta Toure-Puri, GFF Director, says one of the fund’s main goals is to move beyond delaying the age of marriage “to equip women and girls to live a better life.” She stresses the importance of gender-sensitive education and skills training, and programming on sexual and reproductive health and rights, saying, “These interventions also equip girls who were already child brides to land on their feet if they decide to leave their marriage.”
GFF grantee strategies are diverse, and include theater, leadership and negotiation skills development, and one-on-one mentoring from teachers. Toure-Puri says a grantee partner in Jharkhand, India, that focuses on girls’ football/soccer has found the sport helps “girls gain access to public spaces, move more freely, have choice in what they wear, and begin to explore and question gender discrimination and harmful social norms.”
A 19-year-old woman who is a program coach says, “Football gave me the confidence and freedom to stand up for myself. I was pressured by my family to marry early... I resisted the pressure and continued to study and play football. Now, I know that nothing can stop me from being successful.”
In Nepal, caste systems subjugate some girls, exclude them from school and separate them from peers labeled as higher caste. A GFF grantee is supporting inclusive, multi-caste girls clubs and directly encouraging the girls to reenter school. One club member says, “None of us go to school, but the girls club has been a reminder of why school is important. I’ve been thinking of going back to school.”
GFF funding partner Echidna Giving focuses on gender equality in education in lower-income countries, and this is its first initiative on child marriage. Erin Ganju, Echidna managing director, says, “A key reason girls drop out of secondary school before graduating [is] early marriage.” More than 60% of current GFF grantees use education as a lever to free girls from the prescribed route of child marriage and to support girls and women who have already married in youth.
Toure-Puri says one grantee invests in STEM job skills training because its staff believes “when a girl’s earning potential increases, she is perceived as more valuable to the community, [reducing] the pressure to get married.” Another grantee delivers supplementary curricula around menstrual hygiene and gender-based violence to girls in public secondary schools.
Several GFF grantees create safe spaces and avenues for girls to access age-appropriate information on sexual and reproductive health, including reproductive development, contraception and other topics. Established gender norms and societal efforts to control teen girls’ sexual and reproductive lives drive the practice of child marriage, according to a 2019 report, “Tackling the Taboo.” This report was commissioned by a Child, Early and Forced Marriage and Unions and Sexuality Working Group, of which Girls Not Brides is a member. Kendeda was one of the study’s funders. The researchers who penned the paper analyzed programs with gender-transformative approaches (GTAs), which center on raising awareness of gender norms and promoting equity and empowerment for girls, women and gender-nonconforming people.
The report states that teen sexuality, while taboo in many cultures, must be included in efforts to dismantle the structures that underpin child marriage. Teens who are informed about and aware of their sexuality and their sexual identity, rights and health are better prepared to make safe and consensual choices regarding sex, marriage, parenthood and other issues, and to carry out their own advocacy in these realms.
Backlash and the Importance of Communication
While teen girls are powerful and central to these efforts, they need allies, advocates and support networks. As one youth-led group in India told the authors of “Tackling the Taboo,” “Young people don’t just run on motivation and fresh air.” Engaging multiple generations and genders within a community is a key strategy in shifting norms and ending child marriage. Men, boys, grandmothers, aunts and others all play a role in preserving or evolving gender roles. Toure-Puri says women who were child brides themselves can sometimes be particularly powerful allies. But even with locally driven efforts to address patriarchal norms and end youth marriage, cultural backlash remains common.
Girls Not Brides CEO Dr. Faith Mwangi-Powell says, “Where there is resistance, communication is very important.” She says the Girls Not Brides team finds increasing community awareness that child marriage limits girls’ future opportunities “encourages people to see it as an issue that needs to be addressed.” Discussing how girls “are valued and treated [can] progress the debate… [sharing] stories where girls or communities have managed to stop or end child marriages” is an inspirational tactic, she says.
Kimball of Kendeda also mentions the power of talking about early marriage within communities. She says it “becomes an entry for exploring the aspirations and agency of girls,” and a way to address impediments to their well-being. And through Kendeda’s work, her understanding of the parents involved in child marriage has “deepened” over time. “Media often portray parents as uncaring people who marry off their daughters against their will, [but] all the parents I’ve met are loving people trying to do right by their daughters under extremely difficult, constrained circumstances,” she says.
Myrum of NoVo highlights the importance of listening. She says NoVo has learned through its work with child marriage to “start by listening to girls and women.” She says this allows NoVo to better understand the challenges they face and witness their “fearless and vibrant advocacy and systems change work.”
Mwangi-Powell says that according to the Girls Not Brides theory of change, “[Sustainable] change requires working at the level of girls, their families and communities… girls and communities are given a voice as to exactly what changes will help to reduce child marriage, and the organizations working with them can take these changes on board while working to influence laws and policies around girls.”
The “Taboo” report authors state that even “well-articulated programs that involve parents and communities” often experience backlash, but that “it can be argued that this iterative and complex journey is already ‘transformative,’ as it shakes the foundations upon which unequal gender norms are established.”
The Road Ahead
During its learning year, GFF is holding grantee convenings in each country with content tailored to the CBOs’ needs. In India, grantees learned about international funding, and in Uganda, transforming social norms was identified as an area of interest. At the meetings, grantees also share their own experiences, give feedback to the fund and engage in lighter activities like cocktail hours and self-defense classes.
GFF’s early aims include evaluating what is and isn’t working and generating and sharing proof of the effectiveness of CBOs. “We are gearing up to build a solid body of evidence around [how] CBOs do move the needle on ending child marriage,” Toure-Puri says.
What might this evidence look like? Kreinin of Packard gives one example from the foundation’s previous work with child marriage. Packard grantee Pathfinder International ran a program called PRACHAR (meaning “promote” in Hindi) that engaged unmarried girls and boys, parents and influential community leaders in Bihar, India “to shift norms around early marriage and childbearing.” It achieved measurable success, Kreinin says—“[Young] women who participated in the program were married 2.6 years later than those who [didn’t].” Of course, the larger societal shifts and culture change that produced these stats can alter many areas of girls’ and women’s lives, and are hard to quantify. “Tackling the Taboo” states that organizations involved in this work need support in developing and “applying measures that capture norm-change beyond the age of marriage, including empowerment and agency over time… ”
Similarly, Mwangi-Powell of Girls Not Brides says GFF needs to “capture and share compelling stories of positive change and use innovative ways to demonstrate impact.”
The fund hopes to connect the CBOs it supports to a larger ecosystem of policy advocates and feminist movements at the regional, national and international levels. And it will try to help the grassroots groups attract more funding. “[CBOs], especially those led by girls and women, are drastically underfunded,” Myrum of NoVo says.
Toure-Puri says, “Most [CBOs] struggle to meet the required compliance and due diligence standards of most international funders.” She says GFF will serve as a “bridge” and help “like-minded funders” get money to these groups “by absorbing most of the burden for due diligence.”
As we recently reported, this kind of intermediary role is often taken up by women’s funds around the world. Toure-Puri says GFF is in the initial stages of partnering with women’s funds and other peer grantmakers. “We are leveraging the experience of women’s funds that have a long history of working in this space to help us advance our approach to gender transformative, girl-centered and feminist grantmaking,” and to identify funding gaps in these areas, she says.
Kimball says GFF demonstrates that big philanthropies can effectively support local groups in ways that are “transformative for girls and families.” She hopes that over the next five years, more foundations will “lean into this work.”
Singh of CIFF hopes the fund can help CBOs build capacity and collaborate among themselves and externally, and that “at least one of [the countries GFF concentrates on] comes close to the tipping point for the eradication of child marriage… Accelerated progress to end child marriage is what is needed. We do not have time, because the girls do not have time.”
