Join the Journey: Shaping a Global Shared Research Agenda to Prevent and Respond to Child Marriage

PICTURED: Ruksana, 12, writes her name on the blackboard during a girls-only class at a UNICEF-supported learning centre in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

About this meeting

This meeting was hosted by CRANK, the UNFPA–UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage, UNICEF Innocenti, and WHO, to invite people to take part in shaping a global shared research agenda on child marriage.

In this session, we:

• Shared insights on the progress of the Global Shared Research Agenda.
• Discussed the findings from a new Stocktaking Scoping Review: Progress, Gaps and Challenges in Research on Child Marriage Prevention and Support for Married Girls, presented by Margaret Greene.
• Introduced the consultation process, which encourages participation in shaping the agenda to accelerate evidence-based action to end child marriage.

By joining the process, you’ll help define research priorities, bridge evidence with action, and ensure that strategies to end child marriage are grounded in the knowledge that matters most.

Why is a global shared research agenda needed?

In many contexts across the world, conflict, climate shocks, and economic uncertainty, combined with a pushback on gender equality, are intensifying risks and eroding girls’ rights.

Now is the time for an ambitious, inclusive and collaborative global research agenda to prevent and respond to child marriage — one that reflects current realities, amplifies diverse voices, and drives clear, actionable priorities.

Key Takeaways

• The goal of this process is to create a shared global research agenda that is co-owned, accessible to all, and leads to concrete, collaboratively developed and implemented actions. Research agendas often fail to influence action because they lack ownership, inclusivity, grounding in real-world perspectives, or lack a sustainability lens. We need to bring in diverse voices across sectors, countries, and communities, to co-create a research agenda that is cohesive and actionable. Evidence needs to be framed in a way that is relevant to stakeholders, and speaks to the needs, realities, and challenges faced by practitioners and communities.
• To bridge the gap between research and practice, we must shift power to those who are affected by the issue —activists, communities, and girls themselves—ensuring evidence is grounded in their realities and directly informs action, policy, and change.
• Shaping an equitable research agenda means democratising how evidence is generated and prioritised, which means rethinking who creates, validates, shares, and accesses knowledge on child marriage. We must strengthen youth-led and practitioner research to ensure priorities reflect lived experience. Enhancing regional and South-South collaboration will help local knowledge drive global action. This is an opportunity to build on lessons in evidence uptake—emphasising stakeholder engagement, context, communication, collaboration, and multidisciplinary approaches.
• Research on child marriage needs to be more accessible – not only through translations of studies into different languages, but also by creating more accessible formats to communicate and share data, such as audio pieces, visuals, short community pieces and so on.
• This research agenda must remain flexible and evolve alongside emerging issues: this will allow us to respond and adapt to shifting challenges, including climate change, conflicts, backlash against progress on gender equality and human rights, and cuts in ODA funding.
• A new Stocktaking Scoping Review maps global research on child marriage prevention and support for married girls, identifying progress, gaps, and challenges. It reviews how research has evolved since 2019, identifies priority areas for action and highlights key areas for future investment. As part of a broader consultation process in shaping the research agenda, this scoping review serves as a mechanism for promoting conversation and fostering collaboration among child marriage researchers and practitioners.
• This collective research agenda setting process will take a layered approach to identifying evidence needs – consultations will focus on different stakeholders, thematic areas, and geographic contexts. The inputs from the consultations will be consolidated and refined, then wrapped into a global priority-setting survey. We will use different forms of consultations at national, regional, and global levels to collect these inputs, with a comprehensive extensive facilitation toolkit to support this coming soon.
• Your engagement will help us ensure that this research agenda is inclusive, practical, relevant, and robust, and that it responds to your needs and your contexts. These consultations – whether at national, regional, or global level – are open to everyone, and will take place in a range of formats, from facilitated consultations to online engagement platforms, to key informant interviews and focus group discussions. This agenda is only as strong as the voices that shape it.
• This shared research agenda needs to be inclusive and grounded, with the lived experience of girls, young people, activists, practitioners, and communities guiding our priorities. Shifting the power balance and centring the active participation and leadership of girls, young activists, and new-generation researchers is critical to ensure that challenges such as supporting married girls, returning girls to school, and addressing mental health receive the attention they deserve.

Collaboration is critical in ensuring that diverse voices shape and ground this shared agenda – please join us in co-creating this agenda together.