Thank you so much for the question.
You're right: it's challenging because some of these practices are long-held. In fact, their roots are in what is obviously misguided but intended to be protection of the girl. By marrying her, somehow you're keeping her safe from other potentially worse fates.
I think one of our most powerful arguments and it works certainly with local chiefs is offering alternative routes for these girls. Obviously, this happens most often in rural areas that are impoverished. What are the opportunities for these girls to make their way out of poverty and the burden that they place on their parents, in terms of having so many children to feed? Underlying it all is the family planning issue. We'll put that aside.
Part of it is giving those girls opportunities to stay in school. It doesn't take much to convince the chiefs and the local authorities that an economically active young woman who is financially literate and literate is able to earn more money and manage her own business. Examples were given earlier of income generation and giving young women the opportunities to be part of the economic life of the village and the town. These women contribute much more to the community than they would if they got married and had five or six children. Economic arguments have been really powerful in terms of changing the trajectory for those young girls.
What we found, especially with traditional leadership, is that often when you speak to a local chief, he wants to keep his own child in school. His daughter is in high school, or probably graduating from university in the city. Often you have to appeal to their own expectations for their own daughters. This has been a great entry point with many of these fathers. When you give them opportunities for their girls to do better, there is very seldom a father who would not want to embrace that for his daughter. If they don't see those opportunities and they don't see that pathway, it's more difficult.
There are economic arguments.
Part of this is making the girls empowered enough to advocate for themselves, arming them with the right kind of arguments. Most of those girls completely understand the value of staying in school. They love being in school.
What we found in many of our adolescent girls is that holistic programming, involving their mothers as their advocates, is also a very powerful tool. We engage the mothers in many of these programs, giving them the tools they need, the arguments they need, to convince the decision-makers in the family that these girls need to stay in school.
If we think a little bit outside of the child marriage context in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, which is obviously where some of the biggest challenges are, we have a program in Jamaica, for example, which has a huge teenage pregnancy challenge, related both to early marriage and to unplanned teen pregnancies. What we found is that interventions that often include financial incentives to get the girls back into school have been very helpful for those girls' families. These are poor urban girls whose families don't see the advantages of an expensive education. Additional financial incentives for getting girls, who may already have had one child, back into school and preventing them from having multiple children have been very successful with very minimal interventions.