Girls Not Brides (GNB) hosted their 2nd Global Meeting from 25 - 27 June 2018 in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. Girls Not Brides is a global partnership of more than 800 civil society organizations from over 95 countries committed to ending child marriage and enabling girls to fulfil their potential.
The meeting was aimed to bring together the world’s leading advocates to end child marriage to:
- Connect: Build an ever-closer and more effective global partnership
- Learn: Share knowledge and evidence about what works to address child marriage
- Inspire: Celebrate progress to ensure more action and resources
- Align: Agree on next steps to achieve our common strategic objectives
About 500 participants from 74 countries around the world including development worker, activists, government officials, civil society organizations, public private donor organizations, and representatives from UNICEF, UN Women, WHO, World Bank Group and UNFPA took part in the meeting. Rafiqul Islam (Project Manager, Tipping Point) and Suraiya Sultana (Project Officer, Tipping Point) of the CARE Bangladesh Tipping Point team participated in the meeting and shared their collective experience, learning and knowledge. They conducted the following 3 sessions:
1. Promoting sustainable change through our own self-reflection and transformation: In this session, the team shared their learning to provide participants an understanding of why staff transformation is critical, how the Tipping Point project prioritized it and also shares some tools and ideas on how participants themselves can take similar actions in their context and projects.
2. Creative participatory art influence, girl-led approaches to ending child marriage: In this session, Rafiqul Islam (Project Manager, Tipping Point) and Suraiya Sultana (Project Officer, Tipping Point) shared how the Tipping Point project utilizes art as a tool with adolescent girls to develop positive messages on complex issues. They presented a brief presentation on “Icche Dana” through a comic strip. The audience also participated in an interactive art activity and made art together.
3. Moving from age to agency: redefining success and measuring change: The objective of this session was to explore different approaches to monitoring, evaluation, and learning that can help measure the changes we seek in girls’ lives, as well as in the world around them. Here, the Tipping Point project presented their Monitoring and Evaluation tools “Outcome mapping” and “SenseMaker”. The Tipping Point team demonstrated whether it is solely about age at marriage or about what agency and power girls have to resist conservative social norms and patriarchal structures that fuel the practice.
During the global meeting, The Kendeda Fund announced an exciting new funding initiative: Girls First Fund which brings together funding from a group of private donors to community-based organizations working to end child marriage. We hope that the powerful insights gathered from this innovative program will positively influence an end to child marriage.
For more information about the Girls Not Brides initiative and the Global Meeting 2018 please visit:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1835757276475449/
https://www.girlsnotbrides2018.org/en/h
