Gender-transformative collective action to address child marriage – Lessons learned from Africa

In this session we learned about the gender-transformative journey of Girls Not Brides National Partnerships and coalitions in Mozambique and Nigeria, and GTA in practice with Girls Not Brides members in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

If you are interested in adapting their experiences to your context, check out our 7-step guide on how civil society organisations can use gender-transformative collective action to address child marriage and advance girls' rights.

In this session, we learned about:

• Why we need to take a gender-transformative approach to ending child marriage.
• The key ingredients of gender-transformative collective action.
• What we have learned with Girls Not Brides member organisations in Nigeria and Mozambique.
• A preview of the upcoming facilitation guide on gender-transformative collective action.
• The perspectives of Girls Not Brides member organisations, National Partnerships and coalitions who have piloted this approach in the Eastern and Southern Africa and West Africa regions.

Key takeaways:

• Gender-transformative collective action is critical to accelerate progress to address child marriage.
• We can only end child marriage if we address the root causes of gender inequality, and we will not achieve gender equality unless we address child marriage.
• A gender-transformative approach promotes gender equality by:
  • Fostering critical examination of inequalities, gender roles, norms and power dynamics.
  • Recognising and strengthening norms that support equality and an enabling environment.
  • Promoting the relative position of girls, women and marginalised groups.
  • Transforming the underlying social structures, policies and behaviours that perpetuate and legitimise gender inequalities.
• Approaches that are not gender-transformative risk:
  • Impacting negatively on the well-being, agency and safety of girls in all their diversity.
  • Driving the practice underground or substitution of informal unions for formal marriage.
  • Delaying the age of marriage, with little change to the decision-making power, status or opportunities available to girls and adolescents.

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