Highlights of Initiatives Addressing Child Marriage Part 3
Farhana Jesmine Hasan
Project Director-IMAGE Plus
Terre des Hommes: Stops Child Exploitation
IMAGE Plus (Initiative for Married Adolescent Girls Empowerment), focuses on early married adolescent girls. It is a project on SRHR (Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights).The project aimed to empower Early Married Girls (EMGs) so that they can work towards achieving their rights. One of the key standpoints of the government is to eliminate child marriage by 2041, and they compliment the goal. IMAGE Plus is principally and formally part of different networks like Bangladesh Shishu Adhikar Forum (BSAF), National Girl Child Advocacy Forum (NGCAF), Girls Not Brides (GNB) at the national and global level.
The project aims to create awareness through advocacy, communication and regular capacity building. More than 200 ambassadors work for the prevention of child marriage in their family and community. Girls who were married off at an early age are encouraged to act as ambassadors to work against child marriages in their community. The project believes that the girls who went through the trauma of early marriage can be the best changemakers as no one else can convey the message in a better way. The key intervention of the project is to create awareness through sessions and meetings. The ambassadors conduct sessions with adolescent girls, married girls, family members and the civil society forum. The development of these changemakers act as an advocacy agent and creates a linkage between early married girls and the respective service providers.
Awareness is created through popular theatre, issue-based campaigns, celebration and observation of days like Children’s Day, International Day of the Girl Child and so on. One of the main objectives of the project is to provide services on SRHR and nutrition to early married girls in Gaibandha, Kurigram and Nilphamari.
Through this project, many parents were successfully educated about the negative consequences of child marriages and around one hundred child marriages were stopped in the last three and a half years.
