New research to map international funding to end child marriage 2015-2024

This year (2025) has been marked by donors cutting their funding for international development and for gender equality work specifically. Millions of girls and women around the world are already experiencing the devastating impact of these cuts in relation to lack of access to critical health care, education, and poverty-reduction programmes. As many communities and families are confronted by deepening poverty and economic pressure, the risk of increased rates of child marriage grows, particularly in crisis- and conflict-affected settings. Progress towards ending child marriage is not happening fast enough, and new funding cuts threaten to reverse the progress that has been made over the last decade.

Child, early, and forced marriage and unions, or CEFMU (from here on in referred to as “child marriage”), undermine girls’ rights and agency, increase their risk of violence and poor health outcomes, and limit their education and economic opportunities. Investing in ending child marriage is critical for the well-being and prosperity of girls, their communities, wider society, and future generations. But how much international funding has been allocated over the last 10 years?

Deepening our understanding of funding to end child marriage

Initial findings from new research by Girls Not Brides and Girls First Fund with Publish What You Fund (PWYF) reveal that funding targeted at interventions with a primary objective of ending child marriage made up only 0.025% of total Official Development Assistance (ODA) – an amount so small it would be difficult to visualise.

The research aims to better understand the international funding landscape between 2015 and 2024, including institutional and philanthropic funding flows to prevent and respond to child marriage. The full findings will be published in February 2026.

According to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) gender equality policy marker, the evidence is clearer than ever on ODA that is committed to advancing gender equality. There have been several important research initiatives that have provided crucial evidence to better understand these funding streams and their impact. For example, CARE’s 2025 research into cuts to UK aid for women and girls worldwide, the AGIP-GAGE ‘Investing in Adolescent Girls’ research series, and AWID’s ‘Where is the Money?’ work around feminist organising.

There is, however, very limited information available about the funding trends for initiatives to directly or indirectly address child marriage. Analysis of the trends in financing and programming for ending child marriage is especially critical at a time when existing and new donors must urgently make needs-based decisions and develop strategies for impact.

This new research by Girls Not Brides and Girls First Fund with PWYF aims to understand how much international funding (ODA and philanthropic) has been allocated to end child marriage, drawing on three publicly available funding data sets: IATI, OECD-DAC-CRD, and Candid. The research distinguishes between funding for initiatives with a primary objective to end child marriage and funding for those initiatives for which ending child marriage is a secondary objective. This approach mirrors the approach of the OECD’s DAC gender equality policy marker, which tracks programmes that integrate gender equality as either a “principal” or “significant” objective.

Research to help shape the future of funding

This research is happening at a time of significant cuts to ODA, which has potential to deeply impact girls’ lives. Our findings, which will be published in full in February 2026, show the main donors who have regularly invested in ending child marriage work in the past ten years, as well as the types of organisations that received the funding.

The research has additionally considered whether funding allocations correlate to the rates of child marriage prevalence and burden in different countries. Our findings also show that some of the key donors investing in ending child marriage between 2015 and 2024 are among those organisations to have recently announced cuts to international development and gender equality investments.

We strongly believe that this research will:

• Catalyse evidence-based dialogue with, and commitment from, funders;
• Provide a rigorous, replicable method to track primary and secondary funding to end child marriage over the next five years;
• Inform priorities for future research on financing to end child marriage; and
• Contribute to advocacy for the amounts and types of funding needed to accelerate progress to end child marriage.

At Girls Not Brides and Girls First Fund, we consistently hear from our member organisations, community-based organisation partners, grantee partners, donors, broader collaborators, and girls themselves on the need for more and better funding to end child marriage. Developing a comprehensive understanding of how ending child marriage has been funded to date and contextualising it with recent changes in the prioritisation of girls’ well-being and rights, is a critical step forward.

We look forward to working with partners and collaborators in using the findings of this research to shape the future of funding to end child marriage.