Adolescents

Child marriage is a harmful traditional practice that perpetuates an unrelenting cycle of gender inequality, sickness and poverty. ICRW outlines successful community interventions that reduce child marriage rates.

This report examines the occurrence of female genital cutting (FGC), common rationales for its practice, and its prevalence. Efforts to eliminate the practice are also explored within the context of an emerging human rights framework. The final section of the document reports on the Promoting Women in Development (PROWID) International Consultation on FGC and makes recommendations on how practitioners, donors and policymakers can best enable communities to abandon the practice of female genital cutting.

The United Nations, the World Bank and the International Labour Organisation launched the Youth Employment Network (YEN) to address the global youth unemployment problem. ICRW authored this working paper to support the activities of the Equal Opportunity Working Group of the YEN, which was charged with developing recommendations to eliminate gender-based inequality between young women and men in access to and treatment in education, training and employment.

After convening in September 2001, the Intergenerational Dialogue, organized by ICRW and UNICEF, drafted their Call to Action to urge more effective and informed action to overcome poverty.

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These factsheets discuss the harmful practice of child marriage and how it adversely affects the health, education and livelihoods of millions of adolescent girls. Also included are promising community-based approaches to reducing child marriage.

Download by section:
Child Marriage and Domestic Violence
Child Marriage and Education
Child Marriage and Health
Child Marriage and Poverty
Child Marriage, Laws and Civil Society Action
Child Marriage By the Numbers
Child Marriage Around the World
Success on the Ground: Reducing Child Marriage

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The Development Initiative Supporting Healthy Adolescents (DISHA) was one of the first large-scale integrated programs in India to address the broader context of young people's sexual and reproductive health needs. In addition to providing youth with sexual and reproductive health information and services, the program sought to tackle the social and economic constraints that often limit their choices and actions. This report includes findings from the DISHA program and implications for future large-scale programs for adolescent reproductive health in India.

The ICRW research review shows that if the end goal is to empower women, then policymakers need to make secondary education as high a priority as primary education has been in the past decade. Additionally, it is important to adopt a comprehensive approach that also invests in the social and economic factors that will ensure that education has the greatest payoff for women.

ICRW worked with three NGOs in India to plan and implement simple and affordable monitoring and evaluation approaches for their current and future adolescent reproductive health projects.

ICRW and the Population Council convened "Essential Questions, Essential Tools," a workshop held in 1999 to learn more about the nature of adolescents' work experience, differentiate the needs and potentials of adolescent girls, and identify programs and policies of whatever scale and formality that might have promise for supporting them.