Youth Skills Day: A roundup of what works & practical tools
Poverty and a lack of income-generating opportunities for girls and young women drive child marriage in many contexts. In almost every context, education is a protective factor against child marriage.
This Youth Skills Day, we focus on education and economic empowerment as paths to delayed marriage and greater autonomy for girls and adolescents today – so we can all shape a more peaceful tomorrow.
We hope you find these resources useful in your work to promote girls’ skills, connections and opportunities!
Why focus on girls’ education & economic empowerment?
Through such interventions, girls – including girls who are, or have been, married – can acquire skills, confidence and connections outside the home, improving their mental health and expanding their aspirations and opportunities beyond marriage. Girls’ participation can also increase their autonomy and value in the household.
If individual-level interventions are coupled with community- and structural-level efforts to address social norms and improve girls’ and women’s economic security and independence, the effect can be transformative for us all.
3 resources sharing what works
- Research Spotlight, poster and social media toolkit on education interventions.
- Research Spotlight and poster on economic empowerment interventions.
- Learning report on youth-led research into girls’ education and child marriage in West Africa.
Practical tools to support girls’ education
- Technical note on life skills programmes for empowering adolescent girls: Notes for practitioners on what works.
- Gender-transformative education: Reimagining education for a more just and inclusive world.
- Visualisation tool: Assessing the girl friendliness of schools.
- Shifting norms around violence in schools: A guide for trainers and facilitators working with children and young people.
- Gender responsive pedagogy teacher training: The case for holistic investment in girls.
- Guidance for developing gender-responsive education sector plans.
- International technical guidance on sexuality education.
- Financing matters: A toolkit on domestic financing for education.
- Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack:
- Resource bank of tools to support the implementation of the Safe Schools Declaration
- Toolkit for collecting and analysing data on attacks on education
Practical tools to support girls’ economic empowerment
- Adolescent empowerment at scale: Successes and challenges of an evidence-based approach to young women’s programming in Africa.
- The audacity to disrupt: An introduction to feminist macro-level economics.
- Youth-led labor market assessment framework and guide.
- The care-responsiveness barometer.
- How can we bring about meaningful change for women by investing differently in small enterprises?
- A toolkit on paid and unpaid care work: From 3Rs to 5rs.
Practical Tools for Youth Activism:
- Youth Activist Toolkit: This guide explains how to organise for change, discussing strategy, collective movement, and lasting impact.
- Various Youth-Focused Resources: Includes guides, campaign tools, and case studies.
- Handbook for Youth Activists: Addresses the common challenges youth activists face and offers solutions.
- LAC Campaign (ESP): Guide focusing on a specific campaign but shares information on how to organise a campaign, find the key topic and identify key stakeholders.
- Stand Up, Speak Out!: Youth activism training programme offers a series of workshops designed to mobilise young activists to take collective action to end child marriage. Co-created with youth and member organisations from across the world, it builds participants’ knowledge on child marriage and promotes youth-led community-building initiatives to address the issues that most impact them.
In the time it has taken to read this article 28 girls under the age of 18 have been married
Each year, 12 million girls are married before the age of 18
That is 23 girls every minute
Nearly 1 every 2 seconds
Related content
Knowledge is power: Youth-led research to address power dynamics in knowledge and advocacy processes to end child marriage and promote girls' education in West Africa
Report summarising the learnings from youth-led research to strengthen advocacy on child marriage and girls' education in West Africa.
CRANK Research Spotlight: Education interventions to address child marriage and support married girls
Brief and poster exploring the evidence behind the WHO recommendation to remove gender-based barriers and ensure girls' completion of 12 years of quality education. Includes implications for policy and programmatic work and research, and practical tools to support implementation of such interventions.
CRANK Research Spotlight: Economic empowerment interventions to address child marriage
Brief and poster looking at the evidence behind the WHO recommendation to implement interventions to improve girls' economic empowerment, and the implications for policy and programmatic work and research. Includes further evidence, insights and practical tools to implement these initiatives.