On October 11, PGA is celebrating the third International Day of the Girl. This year's theme is 'Empowering Adolescent Girls: Ending the Cycle of Violence', which offers an opportunity to call for action against child marriage and to end violence against women and girls worldwide.

Help us prevent and end child marriage in every corner of the world and place the issue on national development agendas, ahead of government negotiations on the post-2015 development framework by taking the following actions:

• Recommit to ending violence against women and girls by incorporating a debate/discussion of the problematic in your country as a priority in the legislative and national agenda. Laws setting minimum age of marriage to 18 are a key first step, but need to be effectively implemented and enforced as well as continually reviewed and evaluated.
• Call on your relevant Minister to assess national programs on gender, especially those aimed to educate and empower girls with skills, knowledge and confidence-building, provide comprehensive sexual education and access to health services. Particular consideration should be given to implement programs that protect child brides that need urgent access to health services and education/employment opportunities.
• Reach out to girls and women affected by child marriage as well as to community and religious leaders to understand the root causes, address them collectively and highlight the impact of child marriage in your constituency.
• Encourage your Head of State or your government’s relevant Minister to speak out at the UN General Assembly or any other upcoming events about the importance of a target to address child marriage in the post-2015 development framework.

Check out facts about the impact of child marriage:

• One in three women and girls experience violence in their lifetime. Child marriage is a manifestation of that violence, putting women and girls at risk of sexual, physical and psychological violence throughout their lives.¹
• 700 million women alive today were married before their 18th birthday. Without concerted action, this number will grow: the total number of women married in childhood could increase to over 1.2 billion by 2050.²
• Girls who marry as children are at risk of violence from their partners or their partners’ families. The greater the age difference between girls and their husbands, the more likely they are to experience intimate partner violence.³
• Child brides often marry much older men, and are more likely to believe that a man is sometimes justified in beating his wife than women who marry later. Globally 44% of girls aged 15-19 think a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife or partner in certain circumstances. In Africa and the Middle East this figure is above half.⁴
• Growing evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa shows that girls who marry early are also at greater risk of contracting HIV or other STIs. In Kenya and Zambia, HIV infection rates were found to be higher among married girls than among their unmarried, sexually active counterparts. Similarly, in Uganda the HIV prevalence rate for girls 15–19 years was higher for married girls (89%) than for unmarried girls (66%).⁵
• The economic impact of child marriage in a country is a 3.8% loss of its GDP.⁶

#Endchildmarriage is key to empower women and girls & achieve #genderequality

¹  World Health Organization, Global and Regional Estimates of Violence against Women, 2013. 
²  UNICEF, Ending Child Marriage: Progress and Prospects, 2014. 
³  UNICEF, Hidden in Plain Sight: A Statistical Analysis of Violence against Children, 2014. 
⁴  Idem.
⁵  World Bank, Voice and Agency: Empowering Women and Girls for Shared Prosperity, 2014. 
⁶  UNICEF, Country Office in Nepal, 2014.