CRANK research meeting: Transforming gender and social norms to prevent child marriage and advance gender equality

Engaging families and communities in gender-synchronised approaches – that is, approaches that engage boys and men and girls and women of all sexual orientations and gender identities, including people in positions of power – is a key part of the set of the solutions to end child marriage. This work can be transformational in challenging gender norms and power relations, preventing child marriage and advancing gender equality.

In the Child Marriage Research to Action Network’s (the CRANK) first research meeting of 2023, we discussed "Transforming gender and social norms to prevent child marriage and advance gender equality – what can we learn from gender synchronised approaches?"

Key takeaways:

• Gender and child marriage are relational issues, so we need to work with diverse stakeholders in a synchronised way to drive change, including within and beyond child marriage.
• Gender-synchronised approaches intentionally engage with girls, boys, women, men and gender non-conforming people in all their diversity to transform the gender norms that drive risk and inequality, and to rebalance power.
• Girl- and women-led organisations are central to efforts to address child marriage and gender inequality. Other stakeholders also need to be engaged as allies – rather than as protectors – from the outset and at multiple levels for sustained change at scale.
• Norms change needs to be reflected in programme activities and measurement; we need:
  • More interventions focused on institutional and systems-level change (rather than individual-level change).
  • More rigorous evaluations on norms change and male engagement.
  • To use mixed methods to track change over time (quantitative) and understand context-specific nuances (qualitative).
  • To identify proxy measures indicating impact, particularly where time or resources for programme evaluation or research are limited.
  • To offer safe spaces for reflection, with appropriate support and referral mechanisms when asking about (gender-based) violence.

This CRANK research meeting was a space to:

• Discuss the evidence and learnings from the social norms Tipping Point evaluation, focusing on addressing the root causes of child marriage and  promoting the rights of adolescent girls through community-level programming in Bangladesh and Nepal.
• Discuss results from the forthcoming systematic review by GreeneWorks and the University of Washington School of Public Health, focusing on programmes that use a norms change approach to prevent child marriage.
• Learn from Equimundo’s latest evidence review, which sets out the case for including boys, and for taking a gender-transformative, gender-synchronised and socioecological approach to gender equality and child marriage programming.
• Hear brief updates from researchers and practitioners on new or current child marriage research.