 Hi. Thanks everybody. I hope you've gotten some coffee or something. I know others will be joining us soon, but I am conscious of the time, so I thought we should get started. I wanted to welcome you here. My name is Janet Fleischman with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center. We are delighted to be hosting this event on ending child marriage and advancing US policy. Before I begin, I want to say a couple of words of thanks and a couple of logistics as well. First of all, some thanks to the people who made this possible, to Steve Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center, to the CSIS staff, Alicia Kramer, Carolyn Schrode, who were so helpful in putting this together, and to our fantastic summer interns, Jacob Eccles, Paige Munger, Peter Doley, and Alam Sabri, who have been all very helpful in getting us ready for this event. So thank you all for your hard work on this. So, oh, and one last thing on your chair. You will see eight event surveys. Please feel free to fill them out. We'd love to get your feedback so we can hear a little bit more about how we can better adapt our events to the things you are looking for. So, child marriage, the statistics as you all are aware are chilling. One in three women, age 20 to 24, are married before the age of 18, and nearly five million girls under the age of 15 are married every year, which amounts to 13,000 every day. This is a very timely and important moment to be looking at these issues. There's been greatly increased attention to child marriage, both as a violation of human rights and as a threat to the prosperity and stability of countries. We saw the high-level panel report refer to child marriage, the work of the elders and then the girls not brides organizations, the work through the Violence Against Women Act in the U.S. Congress, the recent photo exhibit that was in the Capitol Rotunda last week, and very importantly the work of our two speakers today. This event will be exploring how child marriage undermines U.S. development and foreign policy objectives and how the United States can more effectively work to end child marriage and raise the status of women and girls around the world. We are very honored to be joined by our two speakers today. Their full bios are available outside, so I won't read them all, but just to give you a sense of who they are and why they're here, Rachel Vogelstein, to my left, is a fellow in the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. She's also the former director of policy and the senior advisor at the State Department's Office of Global Women's Issues in the First Obama Administration. She is most importantly for today's purpose is the author of the recent publication from the Council on Foreign Relations, Ending Child Marriage, How Elevating the Status of Girls Advances U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives. She has a couple of copies here, but there has been such great demand that it is currently out of print. It's available on their website, and I think they are going to be reprinting it soon, so feel free to access it probably by the website. We are also joined by Karen Grone, who is the U.S. AIDS Acting Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment. She will be discussing the U.S. government strategy on child marriage, and for those of you who know Karen and her work, you know how deeply involved she's been with this subject for and the work on advancing gender equality for many, many years. So we have an excellent panel to be discussing these issues, and what we thought we'd do is give them a couple of minutes just to say a few words, and then I will have it as sort of a roundtable discussion, and I'll be asking them a series of questions to elicit discussion and back and forth. And then we will, of course, open it up to you all for questions and answers, because I know that many of you have been working on these issues and have a lot to contribute. So when we begin the Q&A, you can just identify yourself, and there will be mics that come around. This event is being webcast, so we are, in addition to the folks in the room, we are joined by many people who are watching this online, so we appreciate our online audience as well. And without further ado, let me turn to Rachel Vogelstein to open it up, and then we will turn to Karen. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks so much, Janet, and also to Steve Morrison for hosting us here today. It's really wonderful to be here at CSIS and always a privilege to be sitting next to Karen Grown. I am the author, as Janet mentioned, of a new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, the first report from the Council on the issue of child marriage that came out in May, and the report was developed under the guidance of the Council's Child Marriage Advisory Group, which was comprised of prominent experts in international development, women and girls empowerment, and the domestic and international policy communities. Some of the members included Archbishop Desmond Tutu of the Elders, also Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Bruntland, also of the Elders, which as Janet mentioned, is a group of world leaders that has taken on this issue and really championed ending this practice. Mrs. Sarah Brown, who together with her husband, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has really championed this issue in their work on secondary education representatives from the US government, including USAID, from the United Nations, and also members from Girls Not Brides. So really an esteemed group helped advise the development of this report and while those experts are not responsible for its contents, the report was really greatly enhanced by their expertise. So there are three things in the report that I'd like to call your attention to today before we start our discussion. The first is that child marriage is far more prevalent than most people realize, although I see many experts here today, and I know you're well aware of the staggering numbers, but I'll just list a few figures. The UN estimates that one in three women, age 20 to 24, which is about 70 million women, were married under the age of 18. And we know, as Janet mentioned, that many of these women were actually far younger when they were married, about 5 million girls married under age 15, so 14 or under every year. And some of these girls are married as young as eight or nine years old. We know that this practice occurs across regions, cultures and religions. India accounts for about 40% of the world's child brides, and we know that this tradition is pervasive elsewhere in South Asia, across Sub-Saharan Africa, and also in parts of Latin America and the Middle East. The second thing to know about child marriage is that ending this practice is not just a moral imperative, but a strategic imperative because it has broad implications for U.S. foreign policy goals, including development, prosperity and stability. And I don't want to minimize the power of the moral argument. Some of you may be aware that on Capitol Hill last week, Senator Boxer and Senator Durbin sponsored a photo exhibition on child marriage that displayed photographs taken by Stephanie Sinclair, a renowned photographer, who has taken pictures of child brides around the world. In fact, one of her photographs actually graces the cover of the report that we put out at the council. And here you can see that there's a picture of an eight-year-old girl who's named Tahani and her 27-year-old husband. And Tahani recalled of this picture and of the early days of her marriage, quote, whenever I saw him, I hid. I hated to see him. So looking at a photograph like this or the photographs that were in the Capitol last week, few would be able to dispute that the practice of child marriage is apparent. But why should we care about the fate of that young girl in the developing world? Well, the answer, it turns out, is not simply morality or justice, but it's also self-interest because what happens to that girl has broad implications for U.S. foreign policy. It affects the stability of her family, her community, her economy, and her nation. So the council has taken on the issue of child marriage really to make exactly that case, that ending this practice is not just a moral imperative, it's a strategic imperative that really affects U.S. foreign policy interests. And I'll just give a few examples before we turn to our discussion. Consider economic growth. Research suggests that child marriage often curtails education for young girls, which not only undercuts their potential, but it also stifles economic progress. Even one extra year of schooling beyond the average can increase women's wages by 10 to 20 percent. And the World Bank has shown that even a one percentage point increase in the share of women with a secondary education can raise a country's annual per capita income growth. Those benefits vanish from the global economy when girls' education is cut short by child marriage. Girls are also more likely to become single mothers, interestingly through divorce, abandonment, or widowhood. So through marriage, then they are through out of wedlock birth, which I think is contrary to a lot of the predispositions that folks might have. And of course that creates an intergenerational cycle of poverty that becomes really difficult to break. Global health is another U.S. strategic interest that's undercut by this practice. Early marriage begets early pregnancy and childbearing, which as many of you know is the leading cause of death for girls aged 15 to 19 in the developing world. And even when young mothers do survive, the health of their children is jeopardized. Stillbirths and infant mortality are 50 percent more likely when mothers are under the age of 20, and the risks of prematurity, low birth weight, and childhood malnutrition increase as well. These poor health outcomes undercut important U.S. investments in global health and also contribute to poverty and instability. Security is another area affected by this practice. Recent research suggests that child marriage is associated with instability. There's one analysis that shows that most of the 25 countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage are either fragile states or at high risk of natural disaster. And we see reports from war-torn states like Syria or Afghanistan or drought-stricken countries like Niger that confirm that families often pursue child marriage in an attempt to preserve resources in crisis situations. And yet we know that perpetuation of this practice, in fact, only exacerbates poverty, illiteracy, poor health, and instability in places that are already overwhelmed by complex challenges. Disregard for the rule of law is another issue that contributes to instability. We know that there are laws around the world that establish minimum ages of marriage. And yet all around the world we see that these laws are ignored. In some places, attempted enforcement of these laws can be met not only with indifference, but sometimes even with violence. And all of that is corrosive to the rule of law more generally. The third thing to know about child marriage that we highlight in the report is that policymakers have recently elevated this issue on the U.S. foreign policy agenda. In 2012, some of you may be aware, the U.S. State Department revised its Human Rights Reports instructions to require that all posts report on child marriage for the first time. Importantly, in that same year, USAID released a vision for action on child marriage that I know Karen will talk more about. So I will leave that to her, but that's an important document demonstrating USAID's commitment to this issue. And in March, many of you may know that Congress enacted a provision in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act that requires the Secretary of State to develop a U.S. strategy to combat child marriage. We are, I think, all eagerly awaiting the confirmation of Kathy Russell, who hopefully will be the next ambassador at large for global women's issues, and then will together with Secretary Kerry and with USAID put that strategy together. So those are the top three things I wanted to highlight and, of course, look forward to all of your questions. We're going to turn to Karen for some opening remarks, and then we'll move to a discussion. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'd like to thank Janet and her colleagues for organizing this. I'd also like to thank Rachel, who I worked very closely with for the last three years. I miss her greatly, but I'd love to have the opportunities like this to see her again. But I want to thank Rachel for this report because I think it's a report that if you haven't read it, it's well worth reading. It really marshals the latest data in a rigorous and succinct way, and I think it makes the compelling case that she just laid out in her very brief remarks for why this is an important issue for U.S. foreign policy. So do read it if you haven't read it. I want to start where Rachel sort of left off to say that many of you probably know that the U.S. government, a whole of government approach under this administration particularly has adopted the stance and the recognition that reducing gaps that exist between men and women and empowering women to lead and be change agents in their societies is just the central core to effective development. We can't achieve our other development outcomes, whether it's economic growth or food security or peaceful, stable, prosperous societies without understanding the harmful inequalities that not only disadvantage women but disadvantage men. Child marriage is one of those issues. So a few years ago, as Rachel mentioned, USAID, the Department of State really took a wholesale look and revamped all of our policies and strategies to underscore the importance of reducing gaps between men and women as central to development outcomes. Now, I should say as part of this argument, both in the gender equality policy and the gender equality policy, we talked about this, which we released back in 2012, and actually prior work that I did when I was with the U.N. Millennium Project back in 2005, we knew that ending child marriage pays development dividends. And this is actually an evidence base that has started to accumulate for quite some time, even as imperfect as the data is. And we do have imperfect data, so we should probably come back to this in the conversation for how we increase what we know about this issue. But as Rachel said, she spelled out very nicely the arguments for why ending child marriage is important for economic growth. She mentioned the wage gains for girls who stay in primary school but even more significantly for girls who can complete a secondary education. That's the critical point of the pipeline, much more so than primary education for girls. And child marriage really impinges on girls' ability to complete secondary education, but the wage gains, the participation gains, the health gains are essential for completion at that level. She also mentioned that the health benefits to ending child marriage. There are other benefits that she didn't mention that I think are really important in terms of giving girls greater decision making power and bargaining power because girls are often married to much older men. The example that's on the cover of the CFR report, the age gap is really enormous. And young girls lack the kind of both economic resources, the education, the skills to be able to effectively advocate and stand up for themselves. And that's a generalization. There are many girls who do try to escape abusive situations. But we know from a long literature that higher education, greater economic resources, higher age of marriage actually gives women and girls much more bargaining chips to deal with, particularly to leave abusive and unsatisfying and unhappy marriages. So there's a development case to be made for this issue. And USAID has actually responded. So we've been working on child marriage for some years now, particularly through our global health and our PEPFAR programs. But we now have a vision statement, which some of you may have seen, which was actually released last October on the international day of the girl. It's the USAID vision for ending child marriage and meeting the needs of married children. And I feel quite terrible that in my haste, I forgot to bring the copies, which I would have put on the table. But if you go to www.usaid.gov and search for gender, you'll see the child marriage vision online. This is our latest step to redouble our efforts to combat child marriage. And I should say that it's really not a standalone strategy or policy. It is part and parcel of USAID's overall policy for gender equality and women's empowerment. And it's also part and parcel of the whole of government U.S. strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence globally. Child marriage is recognized as a form of GBV. It deserves specific attention in a GBV context. And for us, it's part and parcel of the work that we do to reduce gender-based violence. So it's not something that's standalone. But there are some specificities about this issue that make us think about working on it a bit differently and in a somewhat more concerted fashion. So what is the vision statement that USAID has? The first is this strategy is first and foremost about changing attitudes, about changing the attitudes of community elders, of parents, of men, of religious leaders, of key stakeholders in the population, attitudes that perpetuate the tradition of child marriage. So there's a preventative aspect to our vision statement. Second for us is the importance that we attach to ensure that our programming efforts align with the data. We're in the world of evidence-based policymaking, evidence-based programming. And what this means is that we have to do better at identifying both those countries where child marriage prevalence is high, but within countries, there are pockets. Not all countries, the distribution of child marriage is not necessarily evenly spread throughout a country. There may be countries where there are certain geographic areas or in certain populations where the prevalence is much higher. And so that demands us to, the forces us to think about targeting and focusing our efforts. India is a country like this. Not all states in India have high prevalence of child marriage. There are certain states where it's actually higher than some country's averages, but it demands us to be more careful with the evidence. And finally, we aim to contribute to global efforts in ending child marriage. Janet mentioned that this is on the agenda of the international community. There are many donors, there are many countries, there are many agencies in the UN system and elsewhere that have elevated this issue and part of the US government agenda is to align and be part of that worldwide momentum. So as we begin to implement this vision, what does it mean that we actually do? Well, the first is that we are prioritizing efforts to adjust child marriage in two specific ways that I think are really important for us. The first is to identify exactly as the CFR report did and through our own efforts, we've generated data through, of course, the demographic and health surveys, the World Health Organization, other data sources for our programming efforts. We've also started to use GIS technology so that we can generate heatmaps on these issues. We can look at where the prevalence rates are, we can look at where our programming resources are. But we're looking at particularly at the subnational level for preference rates. So we choose countries first and foremost, but in terms of our actual programming, where are those communities, where are those geographic areas that we should be targeting? So using the evidence that we have to bring a laser focus within countries. The second area is to focus particularly, as Janet and Rachel both mentioned, but Rachel in particular, in context characterized by disaster, by instability, by political change in transitions. Those contexts, as Rachel mentioned, are extremely risky in terms of increasing the probability of child marriage and as well as other issues like child trafficking. So we are redoubling as part of our national action plan on women, peace and security as part of our work on gender based violence, really looking at those contexts of high insecurity. So disaster related situations or conflict or early post-conflict areas. And finally, in terms of another programming principle, we're focusing on areas where there is already investment by other key stakeholders. Eliminating child marriage requires the commitment and investment of a wide range of stakeholders and societies that involves not just governments or civil society and NGOs, but it also involves the private sector. It involves many other actors. And so we're looking to see where investments are made, where can we complement, enhance, add value, where can we fill gaps, and where can we actually think about leveraging resources that already exist? So for us, leveraging is particularly important because we're not just looking at small scale change, a community that we might have averted 30 child marriages, but how do we actually do this at some scale? And so the idea of getting to scale is a principle that informs our programming. I would like to talk about some examples, but I'm going to save those for the conversation because I think we're doing some very interesting things in different country contexts like Ethiopia and Bangladesh and India. And some one new model that might be, I'd love to hear some feedback from those of you who work on this issue to get your perspective on. But let me just conclude by saying that as we do this work, we do this very closely with the range of implementing partners and organizations. And many of you in the room are working with us on this. We're very open to your ideas for how we can do better. And we're opening, we're interested in hearing what we should be doing more of, but being mindful that we're in an era of scarce budget resources. So for us, the way we have to do our work is to really think about how we integrate the attention to this issue in all of the core development programs that we engage in at USAID, whether it's for food security or democracy rights and governance or economic growth or global health. We have to do work in an integrated way. We don't have funds for standalone programs. So I'm actually very interested in hearing from you on integrated programming that you think is particularly effective that we can learn from as we go forward. So thank you. Thank you both very much. That provided us, I think, a wonderful platform from which to launch this discussion, because it has so many aspects and it touches on so many pieces of what the U.S. government is doing. And I thought maybe we should begin with Rachel and ask you, based on your report and one of the charts you have in your report, you talk about the different areas of U.S. and foreign assistance that are pertinent to child marriage that range from the health issues, HIV, MCH, education. But I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on what are those program areas. And that gives us a sense of where that integration is ultimately going to have to take place. Absolutely. And then I'm sure Karen will and should chime in. In the report, I think on page 21, for those of you that have a copy, there's a chart, as Janet described, that really outlines the various budget lines, the various areas where we spend development and foreign policy dollars that relate to the issue of child marriage. In the report and in our recommendations, we highlight three areas in particular. The first is maternal and child health. And that's because of the strong evidence of a link between child marriage and maternal and child mortality, which we talked about earlier. The second area is family planning. And in part, that's because of the large numbers of already married girls who have unmet need. And importantly, the USAID vision for action that Karen just talked about specifically mentions that USAID's efforts, and I know this is true for other development agencies as well, focus not only on preventing the practice, but also on addressing the important needs of girls who are already in this situation. So family planning, another really critical area. Girl's secondary education is a third area that we highlight and really call for more government resources in that area, because we know, as Karen described, how important girl secondary education is. It really is a critical moment in a girl's life where she can become educated, have an opportunity to contribute economically. She's more likely to be healthy. Her children are more likely to be healthy and educated versus she drops out of school because she is married. She's unable to contribute economically, perhaps at all, or at least to the degree she might have been had she received in education. She's less likely to be healthy. Her children less likely to be healthy and educated. So it really is this critical moment in the life, not only of an individual girl, but of her family and her community. And of course that intergenerational cycle of poverty becomes really difficult to break. And we know that the data is clear that the effects are not just on an individual girl, but really also on her family, her children. So those are the three areas that immediately come to mind. There are others. The rule of law is an issue that the State Department works on a lot, as they should. This is an issue that relates to that. There should be attention on this issue in programs that address the rule of law. Stability. I mean, we think about US interests in places like Afghanistan or Yemen. Those are both places with significant problems related to child marriage. And we know that this issue contributes to overall instability. So there really are a range of areas. And I think Karen is right, of course, to point out that we're in a very difficult budget environment. But even in this time of fiscal austerity, there really should be an attempt and the Council recommends that the government really look at across US foreign assistance and foreign policy efforts, the various issue areas that relate to child marriage. Because if we want to be successful in those areas, if we want to make sure our global health dollars are delivering the most that they can, or that we are really ensuring stability in a place in the world where we would like to see that stability, we need to be addressing this issue. Karen, maybe just to follow up on that, we can talk a little bit about what that what that means for USAID. What does it mean to get the buy-in of the different bureaus and in an inter agency way, the different agencies to see this as a way they are going to achieve their own targets? And what does that mean for the work that you're doing to advance this issue within USAID? So let me address that and then maybe I can follow on to some things that Rachel said. We are part of an inter agency effort. We work very closely with the Department of State, the Department of Health and Human Services, the DOT, many other agencies on this issue. We actually have a steering committee that was formed for the US government's approach to gender-based violence child marriage is one of the pillars of that in terms of at the CDC, I should also mention as part of this and that's important for us for coordinating action, particularly at the country level and particularly when we have programs through PEPFAR for instance or the global health initiative where we do integrated government programming. So I think we're much more mindful about how we can both harmonize across, harmonize inter agency efforts but also be aware of our distinct comparative advantages as agencies. So to work hand in hand with the diplomacy agenda of the State Department in terms of aligning with our investment dollars at AID and that we we harmonize in country at post to ensure that our efforts are are aligned. The issue of buy-in isn't something that I think I've encountered at AID. I think actually people understand and see that this is a serious problem. I think the question is more how do we work on it? What do we do to tackle it? And I and this is the kind of in all of my work at AID for the past three years on the whole gender equality women's empowerment agenda. That's always the question. It's not that we don't understand that these issues aren't important but it's how do we do it and how do we do it in ways that are appropriate within the countries that we work on are mindful of the sensitivities that sometimes exist in the political realm or in the religious realm and so forth. What are good practices? What is you know the better evidence base that's important to Marshall? So these are the kinds of issues that come up and that partly is why through our gender our strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence including child marriage we are actually sponsoring research. Research in two areas that I think will help with our programming. The first is on good programs that could be scaled up. What do we understand about about scale of issues and so we've started to commission some research on that in terms of what works how can we think about scale up adaptation replication. A second area where we think it's important and particularly important in this issue is research on on men and boys and how do we engage men and boys more effectively as champions to lead the fight to end child marriage. And we have some interesting and good models that exist in their many organizations which I really love to give shout-outs to including promando and and men care and others like that which I think do excellent work but we need to really replicate that in a much bigger way than what currently exists. Doing research on on the economic costs and benefits much more quantitative research of child marriage and gender-based violence more generally is something that's important for us. So I think these research efforts will help us to compile that evidence that we can marshal and use in in in our programming but also importantly for advocacy. Let me just say a few things in terms of the areas that Rachel mentioned because I think that these are also important. Most of our programming in this issue has been in through our global health funds has been through our HIV AIDS funding has been through the Global Health Bureau. Although we've done some kind of standalone and other issues I think the challenge for us is to think as we think about our programs to promote economic growth or to promote food security how we integrate this issue in those areas. And I don't think we yet have good practices or good models this is why I'm interested in hearing from you in the audience and sharing some examples but there are some things that we're trying that I think are interesting and let me if I can Janet just mentioned two of them now that are interesting. So this is not a USAID funded program but I think it's important research that helps us think about this issue. When I was working on on the Millennium Project and thereafter when I was an academic I worked with some demographers at the Population Council including Sajida Amin who did some really interesting work on Bangladesh and one of the interesting things that she looked at for a project for a book that I wrote a few years ago or edited a few years ago was looking at the effect believe it or not of trade liberalization in Bangladesh and the development of the garment industry in that country which she found actually had the effect of raising the age of marriage by about eight years in that country because of the demands of that country for a labor force that was particularly important but it actually changed norms in important ways and I think we can be thinking more critically about how our economic growth programming by focusing if we can focus in in a way on decent work on the type of employment that gives women skills and career ladders and doesn't consign them to informal peace informal work peace-based employment jobs that don't have meaningful benefits and so forth if we can really think about creating a skilled decent workforce that gives women and men opportunities that actually could be an important catalyst here there's something some other things that we are trying at USAID that I wanted to mention I how many of you I'm sure many of you know about conditional cash transfer programs there's been a lot of attention on this issue the World Bank has done an amazing set of research on how ccts have been important particularly for women and girls but we are partnering with in in India in Haryana in particular we have a program called the impact on marriage program it's a program assessment of conditional cash transfers it's called the impact program and we're working to understand the impact of a cash transfer program to increase the age of marriage so the idea is that you give cash to a family that is below an established poverty line the government of Haryana started this program 18 years ago by giving the parents of newborn girls a bond to cash in when that girl turned 18 years of age if she is still unmarried and we are working with ICRW who just released some of the preliminary results to see the effect of that program on age of marriage and the results are actually quite interesting and promising and there's some other work evaluation work done by the World Bank in other countries in sub-Saharan Africa that looks at the effect of ccts on age of marriage and so in the education sector that might be the kind of larger scale intervention that would have a promising promising results I can talk about other programs but I just wanted to mention those two approaches as ways to think about doing development programming and if I can just add that we at the council have been very interested in following the program that Karen just mentioned closely in fact we'll be traveling to India later this fall and hope to write about the research that thanks to USAID and ICRW we will we will have later this year so that all of you and all of us will be able to benefit from what we learned from that program. I wonder if we mentioned the PEPFAR money and the global health money can either of you speak about how this is being implemented with PEPFAR dollars what does it look like on the ground? Maybe I can ask one of my colleagues who's here from the Global Health Bureau if they want to add but let me give you one example of our work in Ethiopia which is one of the... Rachel I had a discussion earlier we consider it one of our very high prevalence countries it's particularly high prevalence for marriage below the for rates of marriage below the age of 15 when you apparently look at marriage below the age of 18 it drops off the list of top 10 but it's on our top 10 lists of countries and we have actually scaled up and are really looking at our investments to end child marriage in that country. We're working with the population council there we're implementing a five year five million project in child marriage hotspots in Ethiopia actually also in Tanzania Burkina Faso and in Ethiopia we're focused in Hara which is the region with the highest prevalence rates of child marriage and we're doing a quasi pop council is undertaking a quasi experimental study to test the effect of different types of community-based investments community-based interventions so things like community education program change working with influence leaders to change norms for providing educational support we're doing some work in terms of livelihood activities for for women and one of the things that we're doing is we're costing interventions to assist with scale up and and replication. So PEPFAR and and so that's one of the things that we're doing and so PEPFAR dollars in that context in in Ethiopia are also working through our family as Rachel and had mentioned working through the health system to think about providing family planning services and contraceptive services as well as a range of other reproductive health services to address the needs of married adolescents who are often left out they cannot get when you're married you drop out of the system cannot get access to decent services. So we've really been working to improve coverage for married adolescents and the pop council as the latest evaluation at least that I read has reached more than 220,000 married adolescents through the Messer at Huot program and they they do a range of interventions including forming groups of girls to discuss issues of family planning reproductive health power dynamics how you negotiate in marriages. They have a really nice financial literacy module that's part of it. So we're able to use PEPFAR resources for those kinds of things and I think that that is a good example of some of the best of what we're doing and we're doing some of this in other countries as well. I mentioned Tanzania, Burkina Faso but also in parts of southern Africa Mozambique. Rachel you it is a spin off to this report you wrote of also an interesting piece in the Atlantic that maybe some of you have seen and you wrote about child marriage in the context of sexual violence in India for example that certainly grabbed the headlines for all of us in recent months. Can you elaborate on the link between child marriage and sexual violence? Sure and I think that you know as Karen mentioned it's a really important statement that the US government through its gender-based violence strategy has made it clear that child marriage is a form of gender-based violence but we know from the evidence that child marriage can expose young girls to really intolerable sexual violence and abuse and as Karen mentioned earlier it's often at the hands of much older men 5 to 15 to sometimes you know 30 years older than the girls who are married. There was actually one study in India that showed that those married as girls report twice as many instances of beatings and threats by their husbands and three times as many instances of rape as women who are married as adults. And you know there's more evidence there's a survey of girls that took place in the Amhar region of Ethiopia that Karen just mentioned where half the girls are married before the age of 15 and that study found that 85% of girls did not have any warning that they were going to be married. 95% did not know their husbands before marriage. 81% said their first sexual experience was forced and over 66% had not even reached puberty by that encounter. So those are just some really stark numbers and I think it's rightly the case that the US government is focusing on this issue in the context of gender-based violence because it certainly is that. I wonder back to Rachel again, if we are at a turning point in terms of US policy and what this new mandate to the Secretary of State to develop a strategy that would include but go beyond when we think the GBV piece of this. And can you talk a little bit about how that involved, how that evolved, who are the champions on the hill and what you expect or what you would like to see out of that strategy? Sure, absolutely. And there were some really important champions. And I know there are some champions here in the room who really advocated strongly for that particular provision to comment a lot. Senator Durbin and Senator Snow were incredibly strong champions of actually a separate stand-alone bill that then ultimately was folded into the Violence Against Women Act. On the House side representatives McCollum and Representative Shock, both really strong as well. And thanks to their efforts and the efforts of many of the advocates here and others, we now have this new requirement. And I think it's really a great opportunity. You know, you mentioned that this issue has really been elevated in the US government. I think that's true. I think it's really actually being elevated internationally. You know, back thinking even to 2011 when the Girls Not Brides Coalition was announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, thinking from then to now, all of the progress that's been made, even just in terms of the attention to this issue, is really significant. And now, you know, there are over 250 organizations working on this issue, many locally around the world. That's incredibly important. So I think we really have a great opportunity to keep the momentum moving forward and the US has a unique role to play. So there are a few ways, I think that the strategy could really help elevate US efforts on this issue, even beyond the incredibly important work that the US is already doing, that Karen has described. One area that we mentioned in the report is diplomacy. So we could certainly be doing more to elevate this issue through our diplomatic channels. I mean, if we think about our strategic dialogues, for example, with countries like India where this is a significant problem, this issue has to be on the agenda. Thinking about working with some of our like-minded colleagues, Karen mentioned that as a priority for the US. That's certainly something we can do with the UK, with the Norwegians, the Canadians, the Australians. We've heard a lot of interest express, particularly in the last few years. And we could formalize that. Back in 2010, the US government actually formed an alliance on maternal, reproductive and newborn health together with DFID, the British Development Agency, the Australian Development Agency, and the Gates Foundation, which of course is big enough to be its own development agency, and really work together on the ground to make sure that efforts were being coordinated and leveraged wherever possible. You know, an effort like that on this issue could be really helpful. In terms of diplomacy, putting together a separate report potentially on the issue of child marriage could help really highlight this issue. And it's really important, I think that this issue has been included now as a requirement in human rights reports, but as many of us know, those human rights reports are quite long. If we think of a report like the Trafficking in Persons Report, where you have countries really being ranked on their efforts, that could be a similar model that we could take on this issue. And then of course, the all important post 2015 process related to the development goals that the world will set. It's really, I think, heartening to see that the issue of child marriage made it into the high level panel report that was recently submitted to the Secretary General. I know that John Podesta, who represented the US on that high level panel, has championed this issue. And I think the US has a really important role to play in ensuring over the next two years that this issue is elevated internationally. And then we get down to the money. So Karen, with no new resources, though you have identified some very interesting research, and obviously you've both referred to the important policy framework that's been developed, particularly in the last few years, how do you actually implement these programs in the integrated fashion that you've identified will be necessary, but with a level of scale and impact that's going to make a difference? It's a really important question, but can I just, before I answer that, just say one thing about the turning point. Because I think that's important. I think that Rachel and everybody is right. There is a lot of momentum right now. I don't necessarily think we're quite at the point of a turning point yet. I think that we have a little bit more work to do. And I think this is true not just of child marriage, but I think of our work on gender-based violence more generally on some of the really hard gender equality issues for which we've not had traction for many years. I just think that this is not the time to sit on the laurels and say, okay, we've achieved something. I think it means we have to really redouble efforts. And what I'm going to say, I think leads into your question, is that when I say we redouble efforts, we actually have to show programs that work, that are effective and show results. And not just show results for ending child marriage, but show the development and dividends. Why that is good in terms of economic growth? Why that is good in terms of our broader objectives for peace and stability in different countries? So I think this is really, really important. And that's where I think we have to focus a lot of our attention. So how do we do this? I mean, I don't necessarily, I'm interested in hearing from you in the audience about this. I don't necessarily know how we do this. I can talk about some of the kinds of programs that we're doing. And some principles that I think are important that can lead to scale that have, I think we haven't had the evidence in terms of cost effectiveness there. We do need research on that, but seem to be working. So for instance in Bangladesh, we're partnering, and this is a principle of good work, and this is why it's part of our vision statement. To work on this issue, you need partnerships. We cannot do it alone. So the important partnerships for us are clearly government partnerships. You need ministries, you need health ministries, you need education ministries, you need key ministries involved, you need civil society organizations, but you need some kind of infrastructure to make this happen. So for instance in Bangladesh, where we are partnering with the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, we're also partnering with the Ministry of Social Welfare in two districts, and we are doing multi-sectoral programming. And that's a little bit harder for USAID to do because we have stovepipe dollars, we have dollars for education that are about early grade reading and we have earmarks for water and sanitation and so forth. So we have PEPFAR, we have our earmarks. So we have to be very creative in thinking about how working on child marriage addresses the goals of education or water and sanitation and so forth and cobble money together from different places. So we are doing a multi-sectoral approach to improve girls' access to education and livelihoods, to delay marriage consistent with the government policy. It's also a conditional cash transfer program. It does include important cash incentives to keep girls in school. It provides livelihood training. We also do a lot of work in other countries on things like behavior change and community mobilization. And I think those are important to some extent but I have to say in my, I'm not trying to be too critical of my own agency but I really think we probably have to do better to evaluate those efforts. We have one good example in Yemen where we implemented the Safe Age of Marriage project where it was a project that worked on community mobilization that included a lot of school-based education interventions and mobile clinics in the health sector which I think was really important to raise the age of marriage. And in 2010, community members pledged to ban marriage and set marriage dowry at 400,000 Yemeni realls to deter marriage. And there was an evaluation that actually showed that the most commonly reported age of marriage among girls, 10 to 17, rose from 14 years of age to 17 years of age over the course of the project. And I think that's really important. But we have to understand what worked about that in terms of what were the types of messages or whether it was the champions or those other kinds of things. So I think if we have evidence like this and we can show what the effects are in terms of broader development programming, we're going to be able to have less difficulty in terms of channeling the investment dollars and understanding why in an education program or a health program or an economic growth program, we need to be focusing on this as well. Because I myself, I mean, we just are not going to have the money for standalone programming. That is just the reality of the world that we live in. And clearly, it's still early days of seeing the roll out of all these efforts. And I certainly take your point that it is a time to increase the momentum and redouble the work so that the important progress that's been made, at least in the policy and the framework and the attention is translated into action on the ground. I understand at some point soon I have to stop asking questions and open it up to you. But let me ask just a couple of final things and then we'll open it up. Rachel, you came out of a very important pioneering work at the Office of Global Women's Issues. So you know the challenges of moving this through the US government. How would you prioritize where to take action? And how to identify the places to show the kind of early impact and evidence that Karen's referring to? That's a great question. And in the report, we make a series of recommendations. And I think a lot of what we recommend, Karen's actually already talked about today. And USAID, in fact, is doing or the State Department is doing. But I think there are some criteria to think about, particularly when you think about prioritizing countries and country selection. One issue to consider is certainly prevalence and population. I think if you look at a cross cut of population and prevalence, you learn some interesting things. We've already talked about India being home to 40% of the world's known child brides. But interestingly, if you look at a cross cut of population and prevalence, Brazil is actually at the top of the list of countries of girls married under the age of 18. And I think most folks don't know that. And we should think about that when we're thinking about how to prioritize this issue. There's actually a chart in the report that has exactly that cross cut of population and prevalence. Certainly considering places where prevalence under the age of 15 is high, places like Niger or Bangladesh or places in West Africa, for example, because we know that the effects on girls 14 and under are the most severe. Thinking about political will is important. Ethiopia has been mentioned today. That's a place where you actually have a commitment by the government. There's a national strategy on harmful traditional practices that includes child marriage. We've actually seen places in Ethiopia where the rate of child marriage has actually come down. Certainly challenges still exist, the Amhar region in particular, which Karen mentioned earlier. But I think it is important to think about where we already have political will and governments willing to work with us to combat this issue. Strategic interests, another really important thing to consider. We talked about Afghanistan, certainly South Sudan. Yemen is a place that we should be thinking about. In 1999, the government actually repealed the law in Yemen that had previously set the minimum age of marriage for girls at the age of 15. So now Yemen is one of four countries in the world with no law. In 2009, there was a proposal to set the minimum age of marriage at 17. And it was defeated in parliament because it was deemed un-Islamic. So that is a particular country where the US spends a lot of time and attention. And we should be thinking about this issue when we're thinking about our strategic interests. And then gaps. Certainly Latin America and the Caribbean. We talked about Brazil. That's a place in the world where there actually is prevalence of child marriage that is really largely unaddressed. There are very few programs that are in that part of the world. So going back to Karen's question about research. We have very little research in that part of the world on this issue. So those are all issues to consider when thinking about how the US can channel its resources to make sure that we're making the most of our dollars. But I think Karen's point on the research and the evidence cannot be stressed enough. Certainly the more we can show that these programs work and we're all eagerly awaiting the research that Karen mentioned from ICRW, the better the case will be made and then the more likely we are to be able to ensure that these programs are funded and brought to scale. So I think that's an incredibly important issue. And then just in the realm of data, it is worth noting that we have very little data on prevalence on this issue in the Middle East and North Africa. So about half of the countries in that region, we don't have statistics on the minimum age of marriage. That's really important because when we look at prevalence across the world, it appears that only 70% of the girls in that region are married under the age of 18. And yet we think that that's actually much higher and we know anecdotally that many of the countries that don't report on ages of marriage actually have significant problems. So again, the data can often drive policy and it's so important to improve our data collection in that area to make sure that we have the best evidence-based policy we can. One last question for Karen because when we're talking about data and indicators and metrics, there are a few people better placed than Karen to talk about that. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what kind of indicators or metrics you think should be developed around this, what might make sense. And sort of your sense of where you think USAID is gonna be able to go on this issue and how it's gonna move in the next several months. Yeah, this is a really important issue because we do need the data and we do need the metrics. I think the main source of information that we have right now is through the demographic and health surveys and I think that that's important but there's much more that we need to glean through other surveys. It's tremendously hard, I have to say. A few years ago, I think I was very naive and very optimistic about how we can change national statistical systems and incorporate new questions in big population-based surveys that either countries run or countries run with the assistance of institutions like the World Bank. I started actually, I'll get to child marriage in a minute, but I, being an economist, I'm particularly aggrieved by the fact that we don't have basic information, not only on child marriage, but we don't have basic information on things like women's earnings and we don't have basic information on employment and economic activity and we don't have basic information on time use, all of which economists put a lot of faith in and that means that, our estimates of poverty, our estimates of unemployment, our estimates of economic activity are really quite flawed because we just don't have the good micro-individual level data that we need. We don't even know, except in three countries, we don't know the distribution of asset ownership among men and women, of land, of housing, of ag equipment and so forth and I'm particularly aggrieved by this. So I thought, in my naive fashion in 2005, with the Millennium Project, that we would just start to advocate for countries to add questions in their surveys and it's not so simple. And so when you think about getting more data and information on child marriage, you'd think it would be simple, but it actually is a little bit more complicated but I do think having questions and surveys that get at the issue of individual level questions at the age of a marriage and then ask a set of corollary questions is really, really important and if we did this beyond the DHS, if we could do it routinely in the living standards of measurement study surveys, some of which do, but not consistently and not over all periods of time. We certainly need it in our population censuses. Not all countries do that and population censuses are irregular. But hopefully sources of information like the DHS will improve and in their coverage and their scope and we'll be able to use that. In our own programming, so that's at the level of just basic information, basic data, that countries, that donors, that organizations can use. But in our own programming, it's also really hard for us to get information on child marriage and when we ask your implementing partners to report to us on indicators that they're collecting, we are not even consistent about getting that information that is sex disaggregated. And then we ask for age disaggregations and that's even harder. This is an area where we just have to do more. We have to hold our implementing partners responsible for giving us this information. Sometimes we get information in narrative reports about child marriage, but we don't necessarily have it in the kind of indicators that we use. So we are taking steps and have started to take steps to talk about the kinds of indicators that we're asking our partners to report on for gender equality, women's empowerment, gender-based violence. We are asking for our reporting on gender-based violence for our implementing partners to report on the type of GBV that they're addressing. Now child marriage would be incorporated in that as one type of violence, but we only just started this this year. So we'll have to wait for a few years to see how well our USAID missions for implementing partners are reporting on that in a consistent way. And that's important for us because we're asking if we have data on that, we can ask our partners, our missions, to say if we know that in this catchment area that we're working in, there's really high rates of child marriage, we can actually set targets both on the prevention side and on the response side for doing something about it. But we don't yet have the good baselines. Well now it's time to open it up for questions. Please, as I said, wait for the microphone so our online viewers can hear your question as well. And please identify yourself when you ask the question. And I think I'll take maybe three at a time and we'll answer them and then we'll go to the next round, okay? So we'll start over here. Thanks Janet. My name is Jeff Meir and I'm with the Public Health Institute. It's great to see our panelists. It was a great presentation. My question has to do with nutrition, food and agriculture. One of the things that we know is that women are not just in charge of their own nutrition but that they're in charge of the nutritional needs of their families. We also know that women play significant roles in the agricultural production in almost every country. Do you think it's worth it? I'd be interested in both of your views on whether it's worth it to look at what happens to nutrition, both to the girls themselves but also within their families and how agricultural output changes with a function of child marriage in particular locations. Thank you. Hi, my name is Nidhi Kurana and I am from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. I'm a master's student in health systems right now. And my question is for Karen. So when you speak of country partnerships and you talk about engaging the governments, my question relates more to how to sort of engender more country ownership of these programs in terms of implementation just beyond sort of like the integrative programming you have with the Department of State and Department of Defense here. How do you really engage and what has your experience really been so far? Thank you. Hi, my name is Jill Craig. I'm with Voice of America's South Sudan Infocus Program. And I just have a question. If you take a country like South Sudan which does have a very high prevalence of child marriage and also does have some laws on the book outlawing child marriage, how do you get the governments to enforce those laws, especially since some of the leaders are themselves prime offenders? Thank you. Okay, we have the first three questions. And I think Jeff's question was maybe to both of you. Does one of you want to take a stab at it, nutrition? Jill's gesturing at me to go first. So I think this is a really good and interesting question. I, we're starting at USAID to actually think more carefully about, I don't want to call it a strategy but I guess it is a strategy for all of our work on nutrition which actually cross cuts many of our programs. We do work on nutrition through Feed the Future because we have a nutrition goal which is to reduce under and malnutrition to reduce child stunting. We do a lot of work on nutrition as you know through our global health programs and we do some work on nutrition in our humanitarian and other kind of programs, programming. So we're starting across agency look at how we do our strategy on nutrition. And I think one of the things that's important about this that maybe hasn't been as much attended to in the past is you know we have a strong focus on child nutrition. We have a very strong focus on mother's role in child nutrition and in family nutrition more generally. But I don't think we've looked as hard about hard at the importance of nutritional nutritional status and outcomes for women themselves at different ages. And I don't know of any study. Maybe colleagues who work in this area can correct me that look at have correlated or done anything on nutritional status of young women who are already married and what that means for food security or for agricultural output. I actually think it would be a great research project to begin to think about and you've just given me an idea in terms of I do work very closely with our Bureau for Food Security in the creation of a women's empowerment and ag index for instance and other things of something that we might would be a great question for our monitoring and evaluation team to look at. We're doing, this is some of the best work in the agency that we're doing is on monitoring and evaluation in that area. But I think this is a great question to ask. I also think when we think about on the nutrition side and this is important you know not directly related to child marriage but we need to engage men much more than we do in understanding issues of child nutrition and maternal nutrition as well. Our default position has always been women because this is a gender role and we really need to think about how we engage men more in this field. The questions about partnerships I think are really important in country ownership of programs. It's easier for us as a development agency to work with a country that has laws on the books and that has their own commitments and we can certainly work with the countries by saying we are here to help you to enhance, to support, to help you do this. That can sometimes be a nudge for greater country ownership. Sometimes it's hard in countries also to get ministries to work as you know, to work together because they're still piping their own ways and try these things and I think we're having some greater success in some of the countries that I've mentioned earlier in terms of these cross government ministry partnerships but they're not yet at a point where I think it's natural or it's necessarily at a scale that we'd like to see. I think that's another question of how you do that. Maybe using this as a case study but there are many issues that I can think about where that's important. I think one of the answers to that question as well is not just the country's governments to assume ownership but also to really think about the civil society, private sector government linkage because that's how you'll get a whole of country buy-in when you think about all the various stakeholders that need to be part of programs working together and at least for child marriage, I haven't seen research on a broad range of different kinds of partnerships to make this issue, give this issue greater traction. It's a hard question that you asked on about the example of South Sudan, that actually is one of our focal countries and it's a hard one for us and we haven't started to program there yet. I think child marriage is not necessarily an exception. There are many laws that governments have on books that go unenforced. You can think about minimum wage laws, you can think about many other things and how to get governments to enforce laws is particularly important but you need some kind of accountability framework and accountability framework that involves involves some transparency and information activities as part of it but you also need I think outside actors who are strong actors who will hold governments to account for the commitments that they made and this is why I continue to argue at USAID and other places that we need to invest in women's organizations and civil society organizations and other rights organizations to press governments to hold governments to account. We're doing some new things in this area that I think could be useful. I haven't thought about this in the child marriage context but we have an open government initiative that I think is really, really important which is about increased transparency and accountability of government frameworks on a range of commitments that they've made, most notably in the area of the rights commitments but this would be something to think about including in that area as well and we're helping countries as part of the open government commitment is thinking about all of the different tools to make information transparent, available, accessible from a wide range of actors and I think that you can be thinking about that even in a context like Sudan as part of an overall accountability framework so something interesting perhaps to think about going forward. Just to add to that briefly on Jeff's important question, one of the issues that came up in CFR's child marriage advisory group discussions was the need for more research in this area specifically the question you raised about agricultural output. I think the most current research on the relationship between nutrition and this issue we've included in the report but much more I think could be done and should be done so it's a really important question. On the question about South Sudan just to add on to what Karen said, I think some of the diplomatic approaches that we outline in the report are well worth considering. I think quiet diplomacy can actually oftentimes be more effective than diplomacy that is done and conducted in front of the world for everyone to see. I can think of examples on this precise issue in parts of the world where this particular topic was raised quietly and we've actually seen progress from that type of quiet interaction so that can also be really effective. The question about enforcing laws I think is a complicated one. I mean we know as was said earlier that there's actually a law establishing a minimum age of marriage in every country in the world except for four. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Gambia and Equatorial Guinea being the four without laws and yet we know from the numbers 70 million married under the age of 18 that those laws are clearly not being enforced and I think it's important to also be mindful that these laws have exceptions almost everywhere in the world for parental consent or sometimes judicial consent and it can be really complicated when that exception exists to think about what enforcement means and so I do believe strongly that having a law in the books is an important expression of the state that this is not appropriate and that laws can be enforced and can be helpful but it's one tool. It's part of a constellation of factors that really make a difference and many of the programs that Karen has mentioned that USAID has supported and other programs that we profile in the report are important in addition to the law. Let's take another round. We'll do this again one from each section so starting over here we'll go Suzanne. Hi thanks Janet and thanks Rachel and Karen. I'm Suzanne Petroni with the International Center for Research on Women. I want to thank you all for your presentations. Couple of clarifications for Karen. One is in regard to the strategy that was mandated by legislation in March for a child marriage strategy interagency wide. We heard you talk about a child marriage vision, we heard you talk about a GBV strategy but not about a child marriage strategy so if you could enlighten us on where that stands that would be great and then in regard to the research needs that you identified if you could just clarify you mentioned among the research areas men and boys and their role in preventing child marriage as well as the economic costs of child marriage. Are those areas that USAID is currently funding wants to fund or identifies a need to do further research in? Thanks. And if I can just add to Suzanne quickly. It's Kathy Bonk with CCMC and I'm with the Ford Foundation. AID just announced the 200 million for Afghanistan. What is your thinking about weaving in child marriage into those programs? Sorry, we'll go to the front here. Yes, it's coming right behind you. My name is Mindy Reiser. I'm vice president of an NGO called Global Peace Services. Haven't heard anything about the connection between female general mutilation and child marriage. Obviously if children, young women who are really children marry very early and they're in societies where FMG is prevalent that's an impetus certainly for it to happen and to happen more frequently. And the other question is regard to vocational education and giving opportunities for young women who may not even go on to secondary school but to have an opportunity for some remunerative employment beyond agriculture and what is going on with that and how ILO can be helpful in that kind of work? Okay, over here. And please let's try to limit to one question so we can get to as many of you as possible. I actually had two in a comment. I guess then the most important one, I'm sorry, Loretta Cacuzzi with Plan International USA and these are specifically for Karen again. I'm naive probably as well and hopeful about getting DHS to include data on 10 to 14 year olds. So if you can move that agenda I'd be thrilled. Also, does USA have any response to the recent Nigeria situation with regard to age of marriage? And in your request for more data I would recommend a study that came out in January of this year from ICRW and Plan on Child Marriage in Bangladesh, Nepal and India. Okay, why don't we let Rachel go first this time? I'll be brief, because I know a lot of these questions were for Karen. On the question about FGM, that is actually something we address in the report. In some parts of the world, FGM is actually a precondition for marriage and therefore kind of accelerates a girl on the path to that outcome. Interestingly, Tostan and organization, I know many of you are familiar with, has done very important work on FGM and now is also doing important work on the issue of child marriage. And in some places in Senegal has actually seen progress in terms of community empowerment programs in which communities agree to take upon themselves and end to both of those practices. So I think a lot still remains in terms of the evaluation of some of those more recent programs, but the link is certainly there and I think it's important to address it, particularly in parts of the world where you see high prevalence of both FGM, FGC and child marriage. Karen, I'm gonna turn to you for some of the more USAID specific questions. Thanks for these questions. So to respond to Suzanne, we do have a US strategy to prevent and respond to GBV and we do have our USAID vision to end child marriage which is part of a strategy. So we're not going to be developing a separate new strategy because it is already part of the strategic framework that has been approved and is being implemented at USAID. And we've done this actually partly in response to the interest on the Hill on this issue and the legislation that has come about and we are going to be doing reporting to the Hill and other stakeholders on our efforts to implement the vision and the strategy. We've already started those reporting efforts. We've had some data calls to the field to pull that together, but we're not gonna be doing any new separate strategy because it is already part of the strategic framework that is in place in the agency. So just to clarify on that, on the research side, so child marriage is one form of GBV and so we have general research. The areas that I mentioned are both about GBV but some of the areas do focus specifically on child marriage. We are, we have some, we're in the process of pulling together. This shouldn't be hard, but it is. We're such a decentralized agency, trying to do an inventory of all the research that we're doing on GBV right now. We know what we've just commissioned but getting what we've supported in the past has not been always an easy opportunity. So I actually hope that we're gonna be able to have an inventory of everything that we have supported. The engagement of men and boys is general to GBV but there is some specific interest in child marriage and the scale up will be for all forms, different forms of GBV. What do we learn that works best? So we're interested in that. We started with intimate and the research on scale up have started with programs that address intimate partner violence but there's other forms of violence that we care about. Kathy mentioned that we have, I'm actually really proud of this since I helped work on this. We have just announced, actually we did this at the US Institute for Peace two weeks ago. We just announced one of our largest USAID programs to focus on gender equality and women's empowerment. That's in Afghanistan, it's called the Promote Program. We're investing more than $200 million in this program and we hope to engage with other donor partnerships in terms of what could be eventually a $400 million investment. The idea through this program is to work with the cohorts of young women who are educated who have completed secondary, who are in or completing secondary education to work with them to further their educational aspirations, to help them transition into different types of economic opportunity and employment, whether that's in the public service and the government in public administration, whether that's in the private economy that's being developed. Working to build leadership and capacity, working to focus with this particular cohort on issues of rights that would include the early marriage and so forth. We don't have a specific focus in this on-child marriage. The focus is really on trying to build this cohort, this generation of young Afghan women's capacity to fully be able to effectively participate and serve the country. And we have a wide range of things that we're gonna be doing with local institutions, with international institutions. And I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this program as we go forward. Maybe in terms of the DHS, I mean, there are certain changes that we've tried to make in the DHS going forward to get them to do some things. This is maybe one of those areas of quiet diplomacy behind the scenes to try to do this. I think we've had conversations about this and I'm not totally pessimistic. I'm actually somewhat more optimistic, but the DHS does go in cycles and in terms of the changes that are made. And in the response to Nigeria, I think this is an issue maybe of quiet diplomacy and other quiet diplomacy of the type that Rachel had mentioned. So, I'll leave it at that. And just one more note on the 10 to 14 question. Certainly thinking about USAID and the DHS is one avenue. I know there are other really important efforts. I see Michelle Maloney-Kitz here in the audience who is helming an incredibly important effort together for girls, which focuses on data for this age group. So, thinking about taking a multifaceted approach to trying to get attention on that really important issue. I'm looking at my watch and I'm not sure we have time for more than maybe one last question. And then I'd like to just give the last word to our panelists to be able to say any closing remarks. So, one last question. Okay. Pastor Brett, I put out a blog for God's sakes and church people hate it. But I haven't heard mentioned. I've seen lots of documentaries about the Middle East and female general immunolation and the marriage thing followed that. But you cross all kinds of areas. So, obviously, sub-Saharan Africa, you're into Christian and Muslim areas. Same thing in Latin America, same thing in India. So, what kind of either help or obstacles do religions put in your way? And in the interest of time, I'm gonna ask our panelists to include an answer to that in any quick closing remarks they'd like to make. So, we'll start with Rachel. Okay, sure. And thank you for that important question. I think outreach to religious leaders is really critical. At the outset, I mentioned that child marriage is a practice that really crosses regions of the world, cultures and religions. I think that you're right that there are some places there is a misimpression that this is unique to one particular faith or practice or part of the world. And unfortunately, it really isn't. It's really found kind of across regions, cultures and religions. So, I think in terms of being effective, laws, a piece of the puzzle, certainly. Some of the other factors that Karen's talked about in terms of the programs that try to shift the kind of incentive and the economic value that a girl enjoys in her society, because of course what's really at the root here is the low value of girls around the world. Those are all critical factors. Culture and religion is also really important. And I think that when we think about programs like Chastan that reaches out to community and village leaders, programs to reach out to tribal and religious leaders can be really the most important approach that governments and others can take to try and change outcomes. But I think it is worth recognizing that as part of the march towards gender equality, we've seen time and time again that human rights abuses that at one time were thought to be cultural are later considered to be wrong or criminal. Domestic violence is a great example. I recall former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talking about being told a few decades ago by world leaders when the issue of domestic violence was raised that it is a quote, you know, private family matter. And today countries around the world have enacted laws prohibiting violence against women. Certainly there's considerable work that remains on that issue and the challenge is great. The epidemic is severe. But the way that that issue is seen has changed. We've seen progress. And I think this is similar. I think that we will, I think Karen's absolutely right that a lot of work remains and we should not rest on our laurels. But we can and will see progress on this issue as well. Karen, very brief last comment. Thanks. I just want to say I think the faith-based community is actually an important partner for USAID. And we work with faith-based communities. We actually have an office of faith-based initiatives. They've been one of the most important communities working with us on counter-trafficking in persons and mobilizing through that community has been to end slavery has been really, really critical. I think that Rachel is absolutely right. And I am interested in the programs that work with religious leaders who are influence makers to help communities to take pledges, to help men in community to take pledges to end the practice starting with themselves. And we're doing some of that work in countries in sub-Saharan Africa, less so in South Asia. I think that's work to be followed and we can do much, much more of it. We have some prohibitions on actually funding in that community, but we work in partnerships with many different religions. My last comment is about, I think, the future. Rachel mentioned this, but nobody picked up on it in the question and answer session. As we go forward in terms of thinking about the post-millennium development goal framework, the post-2015 framework, what will be the global community's set of development goals, largely around extreme poverty, but around attaining peace and stability, particularly in countries afflicted by conflict or countries that are fragile, quote, unquote, we need to be thinking about these issues in a central way as part of that framework. I'm probably not one of these people who would argue for a standalone development goal on child marriage, but I think for any of the goals that focus on gender equality and women's empowerment, this is an absolute critical metric of gender equality and women's empowerment. It's part of what would be the rights-based approach and it should be front and center in terms of development effectiveness because, as we've heard, the evidence suggests that child marriage is a hindrance to effective development, so it is something that I think should be part of any new framework going forward and hopefully we'll have some milestones to be able to celebrate in the next 20 years. Well, clearly there's much more we could discuss today, but I wanna thank you for being a terrific audience. I wanna especially thank our panelists and please join me in thanking them. Thank you all.