Summary
With your donation, AF proposes to advance girls' leadership by facilitating GIRLS' PARLIAMENTS through which girls & women advocate with key stakeholders like police, clan & church leaders, child protection units to end child marriage at the community. This will create a platform that promotes critical reflection and allows for questioning of beliefs, myths, and practices in order to realize a change in social norms, accelerating the reduction of child marriage & gender-based violence.
Challenges
Child marriage is a major impediment to girls' and women's human rights and to overall development. In Uganda today, a staggering over 37% women were married as children, and 10% married before their 15th birthday. The tradition of dowries contributes to the prevalence of child marriage in girls often serve as payment for debt between one family and another. Such customs deprive girls and women of their rights and undermine efforts to improve girls & women status.
Solution.
THE GIRLS' PARLIAMENT endeavors to strengthen the voice, choice of girls & women, and their status in the community. Provides adolescent girls and young women with training to lead, set up girls' parliaments, to enable them to become change agents to contribute to raising community awareness about their rights, child marriage, and gender violence as tools they need to participate in community decisionmaking and to take charge of their own futures.
Long term-impact
The project will motivate sustained behavior change towards girls with special reference to addressing child marriage - train 320 girls to lead Girls' Parliaments as change agents to contribute to raising awareness on their rights; increase information dissemination on Child Marriage among 8500 girls, 164 policy implementers, 2552 parents/leaders able to protect-support their daughters as rights advocates, take action alongside other community members to end child marriage.
