Research Spotlight: Girls' empowerment approaches to address child marriage and support married girls

Summary

The Research Spotlight (RS) examines the evidence that informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation to implement contextually sensitive and intersectional interventions to empower girls by building their knowledge, skills, assets and social networks to increase their agency (ability to make and act on their decisions) to avoid or leave a child marriage and/or access the support and services they need within their marriage.

The RS engages with the implications for policy and programmatic work and research, including offering additional evidence, insights and practical tools to support design and implementation of such interventions.

Purpose

The Research Spotlight:

- Builds an evidence-informed case for girls’ empowerment interventions for prevention and response to child marriage.

- Presents key findings from a review of evidence drawn from 17 studies (mainly South Asia, East and Southern Africa with a few from West and Central Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa) focused on girls’ empowerment and their impact on child marriage prevalence.

- Shares the promising practice elements and ways of working to consider for inclusion in the design of effective and context sensitive girls’ empowerment interventions.

- Practical tools to support policy and programmatic work on child marriage and girls’ education.

Audience

Practitioners, researchers, advocates, civil society organisations, investors and researchers who are working on prevention of child marriage and support to ever married girls in standalone interventions, or as part of broader gender justice or adolescent girls’ rights programming, policy or research.