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The United Nations is calling for an end to child marriage, recently passing a resolution ahead of this month's General Assembly. The U.N. says 650 million women and girls alive today were married before they turned 18. The resolution comes as advocates push for solutions that go beyond laws, including keeping girls in school. NPR's Fatma Tanis reports.
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: In northern Nigeria, the U.N. estimates that 80% of girls are married before they turn 18. Maryam Abubakar is with the Abuja Bay Centre for Girls Education. The group aims to prevent child marriage by getting girls to school.
MARYAM ABUBAKAR: We are not saying don't get married, but we are saying that let these girls reach the age that they can be married.
TANIS: In 2018, the group began a combination of mentoring and tutoring for girls and financial assistance for their families. The focus was on unmarried girls between the ages of 12 and 17 who had been pulled out of school. Abubakar says a big part of her work was getting community leaders involved early on.
ABUBAKAR: We are in - fully working with the community leaders and the religious leaders to see how they can support their communities, how they can transform the norms of not allowing girls to stay in school.
TANIS: Engaging the locals also meant that the girls who participated were not singled out as deviating from the norms of the community. The program lasted for nine months and researchers collected data two years later to measure the impact. They found that the intervention had reduced the likelihood that the girls would be married by 80%.
ABUBAKAR: I believe that this program is going to expand beyond our imagination.
TANIS: The group is expanding to other communities in Nigeria. Abubakar says the families who allowed their girls to participate appear to be changing their attitudes.
ABUBAKAR: They are tilting towards accepting the fact that girls should be in school.
TANIS: What has made the Nigeria program successful, according to Beatriz Velho, who oversees the gender department at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, is that it tried to tackle the problem from many angles by addressing these norms and their underlying causes.
BEATRIZ VELHO: The premise here is that families may marry off their daughters because they face economic pressures and aren't really able to provide for their daughters for too long.
TANIS: The next step for this Nigeria program, Velho says, is to get the government to fund this effort on a broad scale. Anita Raj studies gender equity at Tulane University. She says much progress has been made globally in creating laws that set the legal age for marriage at 18, including in Nigeria, but they're not always implemented.
ANITA RAJ: Many, many countries around the world, including my own, the United States - we are not immune to this issue - it's about a normative practice. It's really about the fact that people think this - you know, this is what is going to provide a girl with future.
TANIS: She says creating education and work opportunities for women and girls has proven to be the strongest solution. The U.N. says its recently passed resolution aims to mark the, quote, growing international recognition that child marriage is a crime and another form of child sexual abuse. As part of the resolution, November 27 is designated as the international day to end child early and forced marriage. Fatma Tanis, NPR News.
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