https://www.thp.org/issues/empowering-girls/
How These Teenagers Changed the Course of a Life
What would you do if someone you cared about was being forced to give up their dreams? Learn how these girls, at just 14-years-old, saved their friend from a child marriage.
Rumi and her friends are among 20, 000 people across Bangladesh trained in the Hunger Project’s Safe School For Girls program. The program equips girls with the tools & courage to stop child marriage & stand up for their rights.
Click on picture to see video
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The Hunger Project: Children and Marriage
– Child marriage often compromises a girl’s development by resulting in early pregnancy and social isolation, interrupting her schooling, limiting her opportunities for career and vocational advancement and placing her at increased risk of domestic violence.
– About one in seven adolescent girls (aged 15 to 19), across the world, are currently married or in a union.
– Globally, 1 in 4 young women alive today were married in childhood versus 1 in 3 in the early 1980s.
– Educated girls are more likely to delay marriage and pregnancy. Girls with no education are 3 times as likely to marry by 18 as those with a secondary or higher education.
– Across the globe, rates of child marriage are highest in sub-Saharan Africa, where around 4 in 10 girls marry before age 18; about one in eight were married or in union before age 15. This is followed by Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East and North Africa, where 24 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively, of women between the ages of 20 and 24 were married in childhood. (UNICEF Data)
Ending child marriage can break the cycle of malnutrition:
Education
– Globally, about 15 million girls are not expected to ever attend school
– In South and West Asia, 80 percent of out-of-school girls will never start compared to 16 percent of out-of-school boys.
– If all women completed primary education, there would be 66% fewer maternal deaths.
– Over 60% of women (20-24) with no education were married before 18.
– As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves.
– If all women had a secondary education, child deaths would be cut in half, saving 3 million lives.
– Education plays an important role in giving women more control over how many children they have. 10% fewer girls would become pregnant if all girls had primary education. 59% fewer girls would become pregnant if all girls had secondary education.
Click here to read about recent event put on by The Hunger Project in Bangladesh.