CRANK Research Meeting: Preventing child marriage at scale

To end child marriage and fulfil all Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, we need to accelerate change and generate large-scale impact. The Child Marriage Research to Action Network (the CRANK) held its second research meeting of 2022 on the 28th of July to discuss “Preventing child marriage – what works at scale”. You can find the key takeaways from the session further below.

Focusing on effective interventions with potential to reach greater numbers of adolescent girls, their families and their communities is critical to accelerating large-scale change to end child marriage.

Key takeaways

• Convergent, multisectoral and multilevel approaches are key to large-scale programming aimed at preventing child marriage and promoting gender-equitable attitudes and behaviours.
• Large-scale programmes can contribute to delaying child marriage when they improve family incomes and remove the financial incentives of marrying their children.
• Cash alone is not enough to prevent child marriage, interventions need to engage adolescent girls and boys to change norms around marrying underage girls, and connect with parents, teachers and community members to promote gender-equitable attitudes and behaviours.
• Women’s economic opportunities need to be expanded to create an incentive for girls to complete their education rather than marry.
• Social workers play an important part in rolling out large-scale interventions, tracking cases of child marriage and following up with children who have been married, ensuring married children are connected with the appropriate services.
• Programmes need to invest in enhancing the capacity of service providers, ensuring services are adolescent-friendly and of quality, and that adolescents can access appropriate services that already exist.
• Successful implementation of large-scale interventions requires continued investment in programme implementation, monitoring, evaluation and evidence-based adaptations.

Session overview

In this session, we discussed the evidence from two large-scale interventions that have contributed to the prevention of child marriage in two different contexts. We drew from UNICEF’s recent report Leveraging large-scale sectoral programmes to prevent child marriage to present the successes and learnings from two case studies from Ethiopia, and the state of West Bengal in India.

The moderators and speakers were:

• Dr. Rachel Yates, Strategic Advocacy Lead, University of Cape Town and Associate Fellow, Department of Social, Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
• Seleshi Tadesse, Director, Women Mobilization and Participation Enhancement Directorate, Government of Ethiopia
• Mr Fantahun Gobeze, PSNP Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, Ministry of Women and Social Affairs, Government of Ethiopia
• Priyanka Deb, State Project Manager, Kanyashree Prakalpa, Women and Child Development and Social Welfare Department, Government of West Bengal, India
• Dr. Yvette Efevbera, Advisor on Gender-Based Violence, Child Marriage and Gender Equality at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

You can watch the research meeting back and view presentations, notes and resources, downloadable below.