UNICEF - United Nations Children's Fund

Published purpose

This project represents emergency support of $10M to contribute to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)/United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Global Programme to End Child Marriage’s COVID-19 response at the country level. Project activities include: (1) supporting the program to empower young, feminist innovators to address child marriage by partnering with innovation hubs. These hubs bring these innovators together from across Africa and South Asia to enhance their understanding of the issues around child marriage and aggregate their creative abilities to address child marriage; (2) supporting the program to launch a global communications campaign on boys and gender equality, using the lens of COVID-19 and child marriage. This campaign engages men and boys to act as champions of gender equality and to interrogate and transform harmful masculinities from an early age; and (3) supporting the program to ramp up its use of digital technologies to address child marriage by developing a coherent, uniform digital system to ensure strategic oversight, adaptability, interoperability and scale in addressing the challenges of ending child marriage in the context of COVID-19. These digital platforms facilitate the faster learning and program adaptation needed to inform Global Programme actions in the path to ending child marriage by 2030. The project supports the UNICEF/UNFPA Global Programme to End Child Marriage, a multi-donor joint United Nations program aimed at eliminating child marriage in 12 countries in Africa and South Asia where the rates of child marriage are among the highest: Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Yemen and Zambia. The project focuses on enabling girls at risk of child marriage to choose and direct their own futures, through activities aimed at the empowerment of girls, with the ultimate aim to prevent child marriage and support already married girls. The COVID-19 pandemic is disrupting programmers aimed at ending harmful practices. UNFPA estimates this could lead, over the next decade, to 2 million additional cases of female genital mutilation/cutting and 13 million additional cases of child, early and forced marriage that would have been otherwise averted.