Qualitative research toolkit to explore child marriage dynamics and how to fast-track prevention

Accelerating progress towards eliminating child marriage and empowering married girls requires not just more research, but different tools. Tools that are designed with action and inclusion in mind. GAGE’s new child marriage toolkit builds on existent tools, including those we used in our formative and baseline work, and hones in on how to prevent child marriage – for girls and boys – and mitigate its impacts on adolescent girls, including those who are separated and divorced.

This new tools focus on marriage decision-making and ask marriage decision-makers what might encourage them to make different decisions. It also traces the threats and opportunities that girls (and boys) face at various steps along the child marriage pathway (engagement to divorce) and explore how a range of services might improve outcomes. Most importantly, the new child marriage toolkit is built around the decision-making underpinning child marriage and the experiences of married adolescents, rather than indirectly through an exploration of adolescence more broadly. The tools are directly aimed at two questions:

1. how can we prevent child marriage?
2. how can we make married girls’ (and boys’) lives better?