The deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals is fast approaching, and progress on child marriage is threatened by multiple, intersecting global crises. Securing a gender-equitable world where girls – in all their diversity – have real alternatives to child marriage means working together, across sectors and at all levels. It means taking coordinated evidence-based action, based on what we know works (and doesn’t) in different contexts.
That’s why Girls Not Brides has been working with key partners to initiate a process to reflect on the existing evidence and identify opportunities to accelerate action to end child marriage and support girls who are – or have been – married.
In partnership with the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage, UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight, the Child Marriage Research to Action Network (the CRANK), and the World Health Organisation – Human Reproduction Programme, a consortium has been formed to drive the process of setting an updated evidence agenda for accelerated action to end child marriage and meet the SDG goals.
This October, a strategic side event was convened by the consortium at the Sexual Violence Research Initiative (SVRI) Forum in Cape Town: “Accelerating evidence-based action to end child marriage: Taking stock and charting the way forward to 2030”.
The evidence agenda pillars
At SVRI over 30 researchers, practitioners, policymakers and funders came together to discuss progress, priorities and opportunities across the child marriage evidence base and share reflections on the interconnected evidence agenda pillars identified to drive this process:
1. A revised child marriage prevention and response research agenda, with updated global priorities based on country, regional and global consultations. This means:
- Promoting an inclusive, collaborative and participatory process for setting an evidence agenda, and for defining research needs, priorities and progress across a wide range of evidence users at the national, regional and global levels that is centred on the Global South.
- Facilitating stocktaking and assessing progress in achieving the global child marriage priorities set in 2019.
2. Promote the uptake of evidence for action to end child marriage, with a targeted focus on key decision-makers – like policymakers and donors – who can drive change at scale. This means:
- Leveraging local, national, regional and global partnerships to engage policymakers, practitioners and civil society to use the evidence to strengthen child marriage intervention and policy outcomes.
3. Facilitate ongoing reflection, deepened clarity and consensus, and capacity exchange. This includes:
- Build clarity and consensus where the evidence is mixed or nascent, including social and gender norms research, and addressing child marriage in humanitarian settings.
- Enhancing skills and awareness across the child marriage field, including among researchers.
A process for the coming year:
Guided by the principles of inclusion and participation, we shared a proposed year-long “evidence-to-accelerated-action” process for 2024-5:
- Defining and co-creating process including consultations at SVRI in October 2024
- Identify priorities through stock-taking of progress and gaps and a global survey
- Regional and national-level engagement to create region-specific evidence generation and uptake agendas
- Renewed global priorities and evidence-to-accelerated-action agenda, with a global convening to launch the agenda at the end of 2025.
What we learned from our peers at SVRI
From the discussions we had with researchers and practitioners from diverse sectors and geographies, we learned:
- There is collective support for this process to update child marriage research priorities, guided by the principles of inclusion and participation.
- The process objectives are well founded, including the emphasis on developing a process that is contextually relevant and inclusive.
- There is consensus around the critical need to strengthen the uptake and impact of evidence at the national and sub-national levels.
We heard the need to:
- Better understand gender and social norms, linked to strengthening the effectiveness of interventions and gender-transformative approaches.
- Better understand how to implement successful interventions at scale, across sectors and within existing systems.
- Increase focus on crisis-adaptive interventions in conflict-and crisis- affected settings.
- Identify opportunities for stronger cross-sectoral integration, for example working with the sexual and reproductive health and rights sector to deliver services that respond to adolescent girls’ unique needs.
- Focus on the need for societal change – where people make change happen – alongside policy change.
Next steps
The generosity of our peers in bringing energy, ideas and solutions to this consultation process has improved and strengthened our collective work towards updating contextual child marriage research priorities, strengthening evidence-to-action agendas and accelerating action towards 2030.
This was the first of a set of national, regional and global consultations that the consortium will be conducting – watch this space to engage and learn more!