Thank you again for your question.
When a young girl has been married, quite frankly, in that first year in a new household, she's establishing her position within the family. And so childbearing, having that first pregnancy, is uppermost in everyone's mind. However once that first child has been born and she's established her fertility, then you can work with in-laws, the husband, the girl herself, and community leaders on how you can reintegrate the girl back into society.
There's a very well evaluated strategy that was done in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, which has a very high child-marriage rate. Working through community-based organizations, a global dialogue was started with community leaders about the practice of child marriage, about the costs to the individual mother, child, family, and community, and about the need to bring girls out of the household and help them get the kind of health services they would need to be healthy mothers and have healthy children, for their children as well.
It was also about helping build certain kinds of skills, financial literacy. If a young woman is able to join a village savings and loan group, a member of a peer group, and she's able to save, then how would she be able to invest those funds when they came to her, in terms of a small income-generating business for the family, which would help the household? In some cases it was even getting to the point of re-integrating the girls back into school, which doesn't happen in all cases, but it can be negotiated and successfully so.
What we saw at the end of that three-year program was indeed that, through this very participatory community-led process, we were able to negotiate gain through these young girls, and they themselves value that there's been progress in their lives. They have different ways of expressing that, but in terms of what might resonate with this committee, we see increased use of birth spacing methods, greater dialogue with husbands around sharing household burden, children having higher rates of vaccination, and strong participation in financial instruments within the community. So this all bodes well, not only for the household but also for the community.
So that kind of evidence exists and can be replicated in other communities.