Community Action to Reduce Child Marriage in Shinyanga, Tanzania

"[A]t Firelight, this is what success looks like. When communities themselves decide to end harmful practices like child marriage and build the environments that support and nurture their children, we will continue to see children who are protected, safe, and happy - in a way that lasts."

The Firelight Foundation believes that community-based organisations (CBOs) are well positioned to stop child marriage where it starts - in the home and in the community - and to prevent this harmful practice by enabling normative change from the ground up. The Firelight Foundation has been working with 12 CBOs to end child marriage in Shinyanga Region, Tanzania, where the rate of child marriage was 59% in 2010. This report summarises lessons learned from an independent evaluation of this work conducted by the AfriChild Centre of Excellence for the Study of the African Child and from the assessments of CBO partners themselves.

Firelight explains that, because they are based most often at the intersection of family, children, and community leadership at all levels, CBOs have the capacity to influence the drivers of child marriage. They:

• work in the space where children live and thrive, making informal systems of support accessible to them;
• can facilitate linkages between the formal and informal systems of support, e.g., building the capacity of community-based child protection committees that are able to recognize cases of abuse, file police reports, and refer abused children to government services;
• use multi-pronged strategies to improve the safety and resilience of children that involve engaging children, youth families, communities, and the government in a process of long-term social change;
• are trained to listen, are deeply attuned to their communities, and can lend their ear to the needs of adolescent girls; and
• are potentially powerful but under-represented voices in policy-level conversations relating to child marriage.

In this initiative, Firelight began working in 2015 to strengthen the capacity of 12 CBOs to: work as a collective to mobilise their communities to uphold girls' rights; develop strong child protection systems that link up to the district level; and strengthen their programming in the fight against child marriage. Firelight began by providing coaching and support for the CBO grantee-partners to conduct community dialogues with their community in 2016, 2017, and 2018. This approach involved using different participatory methodologies to surface the perspectives of children, youth, and adults on the ways in which different factors in the community supported or harmed children's safety, wellbeing, and rights. These qualitative participatory exercises brought to light the cross-cutting issue of child marriage, which was preventing girls from reaching their full potential. Having been actively involved in voicing what the problem is, community members could then work in partnership with the CBOs to inform their programming and - because their engagement was central to the entire initiative - to inform and help guide adaptation of their collective work.

For instance, in a few of the community dialogue groups, participants were asked to suggest actions that would make the community more supportive of children's wellbeing. They suggested raising awareness and educating community members, including parents, on the risks in early marriages and early pregnancies, on the risks in child labour, and on child rights and child protection. (In response to these suggestions, 4 CBOs went on to hold public gatherings to sensitise communities about the dangers of child marriage. They were assisted by ward and district leaders, who gave public rallies political and cultural legitimacy. Other CBOs used film and radio in their information, education, and communication (IEC) efforts to sensitise the community on the dangers of child marriage.) Dialogue participants also advocated for laws to protect children, including laws to protect girls from early marriage and laws to punish those sexually abusing children. (CBO grantee-partners ended up establishing an advocacy chapter in Shinyanga, which fed into the new national policy that seeks to raise the age of marriage to 18 across Tanzania.)

Following the community dialogues, Firelight provided CBOs with coordination, capital, mentoring, networking, and guidance in programming, monitoring, learning and evaluation, and capacity building. As they engaged in this work, the 12 grantees deliberately varied in their strategies and approaches, forming a complementary, integrated attempt to drive out child marriage from the region. The approaches ranged from individual girl rescues, engagement of schoolchildren, economic livelihood promotion, and the awareness-raising and advocacy efforts described above to training of parents, of adolescents (e.g., on sexual and reproductive health), and of child protection teams at village, ward, and district levels.

In 2018, Firelight commissioned the AfriChild Center at Makerere University in Kampala Uganda to conduct a process evaluation of the initiative. Also, CBO grantee-partners began in 2019 to collect data on outcome indicators, including knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) around child marriage in their community. These data demonstrate gains in the perspectives and practices of different stakeholder groups. One grantee-partner, Agape AIDS Control Programme, said: "When we started working with Firelight in 2016, more than 26 girls were rescued during child marriage ceremonies using law enforcement, more than 45 marriages were prevented by our network of community informants, and 33 cases were prevented by children reporting to teachers at school. In 2017, we began to see changes in our community: 20 cases of child marriage were reported or prevented in total. And now, in 2018 thus far, we have seen zero cases of child marriage reported or directly prevented. Children and community members are developing and abiding by the bylaws they develop for their own communities, and child marriage is becoming an unacceptable practice. We have already been asked by the Katavi and Tabora districts, where child marriage is still high, to expand our model to their communities."

Other findings include:

• Decreases in the rate of child marriage
• Increased sensitivity to child marriage and child abuse
• Increased reporting and action on child marriage and abuse
• Positive gains in the perspectives and practices of different stakeholder groups
• Changes in parental, family, and community behaviour
• Increased numbers of girls going to school and/or returning to school after having left for marriage or other reasons
• Increased numbers of children passing standard seven and continuing to secondary school
• Increased overall school enrolments and completion by girls and boys in ward-level government schools
• Better agency and awareness amongst adolescent girls
• Reduction of defilements of girls, which used to occur during traditional dances, at water wells, in bushes, and on the way to school and homes
• Enactment of bylaws at ward level to protect children against sexual abuse
• Decreased rate of teenage pregnancies
• Community members taking on new and increased roles as child protection service providers
• Community child protection facilitators empowered at all levels
• Improved policies and laws at local government and national levels concerning child protection
• Strengthened child protection information management systems for the Social Welfare Department
• Strengthened community child protection structures for the future
• Increased family and community economic security

A variety of lessons learned are shared in the report. Here are a few:

• Examples of positive lessons: It is important to work with both men and women; acknowledging and understanding the whole system (including socio-cultural norms) is critical; and community dialogues were effective and important.
• Examples of difficult lessons: There is a need to look more at other root causes of child marriage, such as poverty, more carefully; educational, school-based efforts should have also included training teachers; and any rescue programme needs to be carefully conducted.

Firelight's own observations regarding what it takes to support community-driven approaches include:

• Partnering with communities is fundamental to achieving real, lasting change. True change comes from demand or action that is driven by communities themselves, with support from CBOs as needed.
• Global knowledge, values, and practices around girls' education need to be critically examined and as appropriate, integrated with local knowledge, values, and practices in order to be contextually grounded and relevant to local communities.
• Rather than approaching something as complex as girls' education with a "package" or a "model", pursue structural change by seeking the support of the community itself to deeply understand and critically analyse what gender norms and actions impact girls' education and how the change may be supported in different ways in their own communities.
• Outside-in approaches (i.e., those not driven by the communities themselves) create dependence on external experts and may be difficult for the community to sustain.
• Communities need to be empowered to understand the most urgent needs and priorities in their own communities around girls' education and then supported to explore what can be adapted from existing tools and what needs to be freshly developed in order to respond.
• CBOs need time and support to work with their communities to think carefully about, and act on, the micro and mezzo systems in their communities affecting girls' lives on a day-to-day basis and work to shift those systems in meaningful ways. The hope is that those changed systems will continue to support girls and communities will be empowered to continue to work on change long after the initiative cycle has ended.