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Drawing New Ways on Empowering Girls and Adolescents and Reducing Child Marriage in the MENA Region

Terre des hommes Lausanne launches a “Child Marriage Model of Action for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region”.

Child marriage continues to be a critical global phenomenon affecting an estimated number of 12 million girls annually, with one in five girls in the world married before the age of 18. The world is home to 650 million child brides, including currently married girls and women who were first married during their childhood, of whom 40 million children brides are located in the MENA region (including currently married girls and women who were first married during their childhood); only an estimated 700,000 cases are reported annually. Child marriage in the MENA region has been greatly exacerbated by conflict and displacement over the past decade, with COVID-19 placing a further strain on resources.

Specialized and consistent programming on Child Marriage in the MENA region is more needed than ever, applying proven models that allow achieving positive results for adolescent girls and young women.

The Child Marriage Model of Action (MoA) is a regional model to guide Terre des hommes (Tdh)’s and its partners’ operations in the design, implementation, and monitoring of interventions addressing child marriage.

The MoA is intended to provide technical direction to teams in how to prevent and respond to child marriage, as well as promote the protection, empowerment, and resilience of adolescent girls and young women, while working on masculine roles & identities. It provides a regional Theory of Change and an Intervention Matrix to orient and harmonize child marriage interventions’ impact in the MENA region

The Tdh Child Marriage MENA MoA aims to contribute to the following objectives:

• Strengthening the comprehensiveness, effectiveness, & quality of interventions to address child marriage in the region
• Increasing dedicated interventions to address child marriage in the region, while facilitatingparallel mainstreaming of child marriage considerations across Tdh specialized programmes
• Ensuring child marriage is prioritized by operations in the region within strategies, resourcing,& programming
• Leveraging a strong partnership approach in the region on child marriage for a holistic, wide-reaching, resource-effective, & sustainable response
• Supporting regional measurement of broader effects of child marriage interventions, as well as learning across countries in the region
• Increasing visibility & resource mobilisation in order to better leverage targeted child marriage interventions in the region