More Power to Her: How Empowering Girls Can Help End Child Marriage

There are nearly 70 million child brides in the world today, and more than 15 million girls marry each year. Around the world, there are a number of programs and many organizations that are working to prevent child marriage and provide support to married girls.

Through the assessment of four promising programmes run by CARE (Ethiopia), BRAC (Bangladesh), Save the Children (Egypt) and Pathfinder International (India), the paper highlights the critical role that girl-centred programming plays in catalysing a process of empowerment that enables her to make important decisions that affect the rest of her life – including when and whom to marry.

Successful programmes were found to catalyse empowerment by allowing girls to undergo an internal transformation by building their self-awareness of rights, increasing their self-efficacy and enhancing their life aspirations. Increasing opportunities and alternatives to child marriage aids this self-transformation.