Thank you for your intervention. I couldn't agree more.
I'll start off by saying that one of our key modes of intervention, especially for the most marginalized girls, is actually to work with men and boys, and to work with what is often male customary and traditional leadership at the village level, because they are the key game changers in terms of changing attitudes and changing practices. You can have the law on the books, but if local leadership and local government is not going to enforce it, you can't get anywhere. I completely agree with that.
One key aspect of our intervention is mapping and data, understanding where these young girls are, the girls who are at most at risk. You're so right: you cannot protect those young adolescent girls if they don't exist and they're not registered anywhere.
One of our big pushes.... UNFPA is the lead agency on census. We've been making sure that gender and age desegregation is seen as a vital part of all census operations, of course, but it starts with civil registration. It's certainly a piece of the puzzle we've been working on with governments for decades, trying to ensure they have the systems to capture that information, and then to properly analyze it when they have it.
In one of our key intervention areas, for example in Zambia, which has 42% of young girls who are married before the age of 18, we've been working closely with them to map all of that existing child marriage. The basic counting piece of that is birth registration figures.
We couldn't agree more that this data foundation is vital. It's going to be a vital part of that post-2015 agenda, and I think we have to make sure that it continues. It's being well addressed at the moment, in terms of what those goals are and how the indicators will be worked out, but we cannot take our eye off the ball in ensuring that is there.
If I may add one additional thing, you talked about maternal, newborn, and child health, MNCH. I would add an “A” to MNCH, because the adolescent has particular needs. I think that as much as we know that the goals under maternal, newborn, and child health have not been reached, we have to factor in that adolescent health aspect in the post-2015 process.
Of course, knowing exactly how old a girl is when she's getting married is the first piece, and I couldn't agree more that civil registration is the first step so that you can actually track these issues for girls.