How civil society organisations can use gender-transformative collective action to address child marriage and advance girls' rights: A 7-step guide

Who this Guide is for

This 7-step facilitation guide (from here on “Guide”) recognises the unique role of civil society as a powerhouse for transformative change at national, global and community levels – in policies, laws, institutions, services and attitudes – to ensure girls and women know, and can exercise, their equal rights and agency, including if, when and whom to marry.

This Guide is for any group of civil society organisations (CSO) working collectively on child marriage at a national or sub-national level.

The processes and tools in this Guide were piloted in two African countries, with Girls Not Brides national collectives in Mozambique and Nigeria. This means a focus is given to Africa but there is strong crossover and relevance for CSOs working in other regions and on education, sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence, gender justice and minority rights more broadly.

What this Guide is for

The aim of this Guide is to catalyse higher impact through more intentional gender-transformative collective action – by employing gender-transformative approaches (GTAs).

Through a series of steps, it supports CSOs, as a collective, in strengthening their gender-transformative skills, knowledge and leadership to systematically analyse and address the root causes of gender inequality, both at the individual and a systems level.

It encourages workshop-based critical reflection and action planning to end child marriage. It leads participants – as individuals and as a collective – through a process of critical engagement with country-level evidence and experience-sharing. It supports them to question the unequal distribution of resources and relationships of power, particularly those rooted in gender norms that discriminate against girls and women.

How to use this Guide

The Guide has been designed as a practical tool for the facilitation of your own gender-transformative journey. In keeping with a foundational principle of GTAs to always be attuned to context, each CSO collective should adapt the outline it provides to their own specific context.

The Guide comes with a set of tools, which are provided as easily amendable templates. We will point to specific documents as we move through the steps of the collective journey, and each tool can be adapted to a CSO collective’s requirements.

With thanks

This Facilitation Guide was produced by Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage. We would like to thank Alana Kolundzija from Collective Impact, who supported with facilitation during the Gender-Transformative Action Intensive Week workshops in Nigeria and adaptation of the GTA Accelerator Tool she and the team at Collective Impact produced with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The Guide and the journey were made possible thanks to the financial support of and collaboration with UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage and the UN/ EU Spotlight Initiative to eliminate all forms of VAWG.

Travellers on this gender-transformative journey include the Girls Not Brides national CSO collectives in Mozambique and Nigeria, their allies within government and UNICEF Country Offices and the project's Gender Advocates.