 So, for those of you on social media, we just wanted to let you know that you can follow us, retweet us, and post on social media as well. You can use the hashtag that you see on the screen at the moment for hashtag and child marriage, and you can tag Girls Inspire, the Commonwealth of Learning and Girls Not Brides. Now, without further ado, I'd like to pass it on to Mrs. Francis Burrell, who is a senior advisor for the Women and Girls and the team leader for education at the Commonwealth of Learning. Thank you, Cherise. Good morning, everybody, wherever you are in Asian Africa, and also our guest speaker who is in the UK, and then our staff and colleagues here in Vancouver, in Canada. This is our third webinar in our monthly series of webinars, which is part of our strategy to build the capacity of our partners and members in our community of practice on various issues which are pertinent to our strategy to end child and re-force marriage. As you know, Girls Inspire is a partnership between the Commonwealth of Learning and Community Organisations in Bangladesh. India, Pakistan was a weekend engineer to address the various women and girls faced that prevented their full participation in society, particularly the harmful cycle of child early and forced marriage. Thanks to grants from the governments of Australia and Canada, the Commonwealth of Learning will use ODI and Technology Enhanced Learning to support the schooling and skills training of 45,000 girls over the next three years. This webinar was organised to increase our own knowledge on the issue of child early forced marriage, and the objectives of this webinar are, the next slide, to discuss child early forced marriage and to share information on recent international developments that have an impact on CEFM. Girls Not Brides is a global partnership of more than 600 civil society organisations from over 80 countries committed to ending child marriage and enabling girls to fulfil their potential. They share cause conviction that every girl has the rights to lead the life that she chooses and that by ending child marriage, we can achieve a safer, healthier and more prosperous future for all. I'm very pleased to introduce Heather Hamilton, the Interim Executive Director of Girls Not Brides. Heather is responsible for ensuring that Girls Not Brides delivers on its strategy and advances their collective efforts to end child marriage. Most recently, Heather worked at the UNICEF Asia Pacific Regional Office on the Public Finance for Children initiative. Previously, she led several coalitions and networks on global issues as Executive Director on the ConnectUS Fund, a multi-foundation grant making initiative and as Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff, Citizens for Global Solutions, she has significant experience in organizational leadership, advocacy and strategy communications and has led numerous multi-organizational messaging initiatives on advocacy goals. Heather, I'm pleased to hand over the floor to you. It's delightful to be with you here today. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time. I have slides, so I'm going to start the presentation and... Oops, sorry. I have to click on Show My Screen first. I believe. Please bear with me. I don't... Is my screen showing? Not yet, Heather. OK. Could we try sharing it again? I've lost the little thing that says Share My Screen when I made the presentation full-size. Heather, we're just trying to reshare the screen with you. OK. Sorry about that. I hit full-size before that. There it goes. Share My Screen and then that full-size. Can everybody see it now? It's coming. Yeah, there's yes. OK. Fantastic. Well, it is really great to be with you here today. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about child marriage and how it manifests around the world and the impact on girls and a little bit of a tiny introduction to Girls Not Brides. And then we're going to talk a little bit about our theory of change and how it might be useful for your work and then talk a tiny bit about some of the recent developments that have come up recently at the international level that can help support national level work. So brief introduction to child marriage. Child marriage affects 15 million girls a year. That is 28 girls a minute. One girl every two seconds is married. One, two. That is how frequently it occurs. It affects one out of three girls in the developing world. There are over 700 million women alive today who were married before the age of 18, temperature of the world's population. And while rates of child marriage are decreasing, slowly, those rates of decrease are not enough to offset the growth in population. So if we do not increase the pace of change, we're going to see an increase in the sheer number of girls married. And we expect that 1.2 billion girls total will be married as children by 2050. That is the equivalent of the entire population of India. This is an issue that happens across countries, cultures, religions, and stable and fragile contexts. It's not just one religion, one part of the world. You can see from the stats on the screen that it affects all the regions. But a surprising chart is when you look at the countries of the highest absolute number of girls married before the age of 15, what you see is that this really isn't something that is isolated, that is just in Africa or South Asia. It's really a global issue from Mexico to Indonesia. So it affects everyone. And I think that's something that's surprising to a lot of people. So what is the impact of child marriage? When a girl becomes a bride, the consequences are lifelong and absolutely devastating. She's usually forced to drop out of school and housework, not homework, becomes her priority. She loses all the benefits associated with schooling, which I'm sure you are all very familiar with. But then she's also usually pressured to have children several and soon by her family at a time when pregnancy and childbirth are really dangerous for her. Girls under 15 are significantly more likely to die in childbirth than women in their early 20s. And these consequences span generations. The children of girls are 60% more likely to die before their first birthday than those that have older mothers. Because they're isolated and without power, child brides are at a higher risk of HIV and sexual, physical, and psychological violence throughout their life. Child marriage traps girls, their families, and societies in a cycle of poverty. The children of girls married young are likely to marry young and then reinforce this cycle of deprivation and rights violation. And that's really critical. It is a human rights violation. It deprives a girl of her rights to health, education, freedom from violence, and most importantly, the right to choose if, when, and whom to marry. All of these have massive impacts on the individual girl. But as the world has increasingly recognized, they make child marriage a major development issue. Child marriage is a barrier to eight of the 16 new global goals for sustainable development. Half the goals cannot be achieved without addressing child marriage, including education. So why does this happen? Parents generally want to do what's best for their children. They love their daughters. So why do they marry them early? In some places, because this is just the way it's always been done, it's just a tradition. There also may be financial transactions involved, such as dowry or bride price, which place a financial value on the life of a girl. The girl may have few other options. There may not be schools in her community to attend, or the schools aren't safe, or there aren't other economic opportunities in her community for her as an alternative to marriage. And in situations of insecurity, some families view marriage as a safe option for girls, not realizing the significant violence that she will face within marriage. But ultimately and critically, we have to remember that child marriage happens to girls because they are girls. While these are all drivers of child marriage, the underlying cause is gender inequality. This view that a girl has very little value outside of her worth in marriage, her virginity, and her so-called honor. So a little bit about girls, not brides. In 2011, the elders, which you may know as the group of elder statespeople who have really had an impact on bringing issues to the attention of the world, they wanted to look at this issue of the intersection of religion, tradition, and the oppression of women. So Mrs. Michele and Archbishop Desmond Tutu started having conversations about how do we do this? How do we get at this critical intersection? And so the executive director of the elders at that point, who is the chair of our board of trustees, Mabel Von Aranya, started having conversations about this with a lot of people. She was shocked to learn the scope of child marriage. I think we are all shocked to learn the scope when we first heard about it. That it's not just something that happens in a few places or isolated. It's really this one out of three, 15 million a year. But there was so little awareness across the spectrum from the general public all the way to global leaders of the issue itself and how it affects so many other issues. It was getting very little policy and programmatic attention. There was fantastic work being done, particularly at the community level. But there was no scale visibility and connection to other people making doing this work and so that people weren't able to learn what was working. So the elders brought together in 2011 a group of people who were really leading on addressing child marriage and Addis. And they said, what needed to be done? And this sets out the agenda for Girls Not Brides, what we reviewed a little bit earlier. The idea that we need to raise awareness, expand policy commitment and funding, and strengthen learning and coordination. On a more substantive level, since 2014, we've been working as a partnership on five major strategic objectives. The first is to really get the international community to acknowledge this and set that global norm, to get those intergovernmental institutions to make those commitments. The second is to really learn what is necessary to end child marriage, increasing the evidence base. Thirdly, we wanted to draw attention to those areas where progress was occurring at the country level, those countries that were taking early action on child marriage. The fourth objective was to increase the amount of funding in the field with an issue that affects so many girls. You cannot address it with scattershot funding. And fifth, we needed a global movement. We knew that this was an issue that required a movement and partnership. So in 2014, we brought together 150 researchers, external experts, and a lot of members to try and get at this question of what will it take to end child marriage? And what we came up with was the Girls Not Brides Theory of Change. This is a theory of change not just for our secretariat or our partnership, but really a theory of change for the field on what it's going to take to end child marriage. It's informed the work of our members by helping them situate their work within the field to understand how their specific interventions fit into a larger process of change. It's also been adopted by a number of donor countries, the UN Global Program, and others as a way of informing their work. At the heart of this theory of change is what we call a catalyzing strategy, which is best articulated as a set of guiding principles or overall approach for how we believe change needs to happen. So we recognize that our work has to be long-term and sustainable. There is no quick fix to ending child marriage and that we need to be working at all levels. So not just the international level, but at the regional, national, and most importantly, community level. And that these efforts have to be coordinated so that we have maximum impact. And where possible, we need integration across sectors. So we can't just advocate for the Ministry of Gender to address child marriage as child marriage. We need to look at other ministries and other approaches, including education, including health, because this issue can't just be addressed within one sector. And then it stresses the importance that we need to learn and share from each other what are those effective approaches, not only at the big national level, but also very much at the community level as well. So that's where the partnership itself fits in. Looking more broadly at this area of change, there are seven levels in total from the problem statement third of the vision statement at the top. At the bottom, we start with this problem statement that we have 15 million girls a year married each year and that results in harmful consequences. And then moving up to the top, we have a vision that is explicitly about the end state that we want girls to be in. That we envision a world without child marriage where girls and women enjoy equal status with boys and men and are able to achieve their full potential. It's very important, it's not just about stopping child marriage, but that end state for the girl. In between, we really look at what it's going to take to get to these long-term changes. So these long-term changes that we wanna see is that girls are able to decide if, when and whom to marry and that married girls must be able to live an empowered and healthy life. It's important to note that we do really put a focus not just on preventing child marriage but addressing the needs of those girls that are married. So in between, what we have are those intermediate steps and I wanna draw your attention to the level of outcomes where there are four key outcomes outlined. When we think about child marriage, many people automatically go to that first outcome, laws and policies, that we should just change the law and enforce the law and that's going to be enough. And while it is certainly important and critical, we know that child marriage is not just something that law enforcement agencies can do. But we do need laws in place, they need to be implemented and enforced and we need to have institutional support structures around them like training law enforcement officials or police force on child protection but also questions about the civil registration system so that births and marriages are registered. But that isn't enough and unfortunately, many people stop there. The other things that we need to see is we need to see that there are services available to girls. They need the right services to avoid marriage and be safe and empowered as well as ensuring married girls have access to services that they need. This includes access to a high quality education, sexual reproductive healthcare and conferences like Jati Education, strong crowd protection systems and financial services like banking accounts so girls can save in a safe way. So drilling down, we then get to some of the more social norms changes. We need to mobilize families and communities. This is really about the work done at the community level with key actors and gatekeepers who rarely allow girls to be the decision makers in their own lives. We know that in many communities, child marriage is a deeply rooted practice and it takes time to change attitudes and behavior. So we have to work with key people like parents, grandparents, religious leaders, traditional leaders, teachers, so there are a number of ways that there's community engagement, conversation, working shifts, social norms, community conversations, street theater, et cetera. So it's really about raising awareness of the harmful impacts of child marriage and helping that environment that the girls are in really support their choices. But finally, and this is really at the center, we need to empower girls themselves. This means building their capacity to claim their rights. So this could be equipping them with the training skills or information or support networks that they need to thrive. So it could be things like girls clubs, safe space programs or economic empowerment savings group. We really wanna make sure that girls know their rights, that they have the opportunity to gain information and skills and feel confident using these skills. And one of the things that's really interesting here is there's some emerging evidence that this is really one of the critical aspects that tends to be missing in interventions and when it is missing, you don't see the kind of long-term impact that you want. So what does this look like at the community level? So I'm gonna profile a couple of members in each of these areas. So in terms of empowering girls, one of our members is the Kenya Center for Excellence in Kenya. They seek to empower and motivate young girls through education to become agents of change and to break destructive practice and not only of child marriage but female general mutilation which is connected in Kenya to early marriage. They run primary boarding schools for Maasai girls. In looking at mobilizing families and communities, there's some really interesting work being done by an organization called Blue Veins in Pakistan which they engage civil society organizations, media, lawyers, religious leaders and especially men and boys in communities to create zero tolerance for child marriage. They also lobby and engage policymakers and legislatures. In Guatemala, a population council is working to reduce the prevalence of child marriage in a holistic way by both encouraging girls to stay in school, the girls in parents, but also providing them with information on sexual and reproductive rights and access to the community services that are available to them. Young mentors run and facilitate programs discussing sensitive issues and how to access those services. In Morocco, Foundation Ito, which is a Moroccan women's rights organizations, they conduct an annual campaign to end child marriage. So they travel from village to village, knocking on doors and talking to families about the rights that women and girls are legally entitled to, which is the approach within the community empowerment. But on this caravan, they also provide healthcare and legal services, so looking at the services. But interestingly, they then also gather data on the prevalence of child marriage in moral areas which is not really available in Morocco to support advocacy work pushing for implementation of family codes and laws around married girls. So they're a really good example of an organization that has multiple interventions within the different strategies. So as was mentioned earlier, Girls Not Brides is a civil society partnership. We've got over 600 organizations from over 80 countries around the world. And it's important to note that our members come from a real diversity approaches that most of them, in fact, are not child marriage organizations. They come from education, health, human rights, girls empowerment. Interestingly as well, we're only 7% international NGOs and 20% of our members work exclusively at the community level. So this really is a bottom-up partnership. It's because we know that community level engagement is really important to change child marriage as a social norm. So looking at what's happened so far, since 2011 there's been a huge recognition of child marriage at the global level. There are resolutions that have been passed in the UN Human Rights Council and UN General Assembly with the push of our member organizations that lay out what countries need to do but really importantly to set a global norm that this is no longer acceptable. And really importantly, in the new global development goals, target 5.3 under the gender equality goal, there's actually a target that every country on Earth has now committed to end child early and forced marriage by 2030. We've also seen significantly increased funding but it really hasn't been enough to meet the scope of the problem and there's just really not enough to go into grassroots organizations. At the regional level, we're seeing really important developments as well. The African Union has embedded child marriage and other harmful practices in Agenda 2063, their 50-year vision, and then launched a campaign to accelerate the end of child marriage by having country-by-country launch campaigns on child marriage. In the Southern African Development Community SADIC, they've developed a model law for their members on how child marriage can be dressed at the legal level but importantly, that model law doesn't just look at the legal changes but the whole range of government services and interventions as well. We've also seen action in Asia at the regional level. The South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation adopted a regional action plan to end child marriage that officially recognizes child marriage as a human rights violation and lays out steps that member states need to take. Where we're seeing really exciting change now, however, is taking these big global and regional commitments and translating them into national strategies and nationwide initiatives to address child marriage. We have seen national strategies to address child marriage launched in a number of countries around the world and while they are very much in the very early stages of implementation, these initiatives have mobilized public support and interest in the issue and outlined the need for multi-sectoral work both to prevent child marriage and respond to the consequences of child marriage. Girls Not Rides has developed a checklist and analysis of national strategies and the checklist is there for organizations in country who want to work with their governments or even those developing these strategies in government to understand how best to develop these strategies not only in terms of the content but also the process, the inclusion of civil society in the affected communities but also what needs to happen in terms of implementation and that's available on our website. So looking forward, what do we need to see? We need to make sure that civil society organizations are seen as by all the actors from international organizations, development partners, governments as really critical partners in ending child marriage. Civil society organizations have a really unique role on this issue as a social change issue because they are at the forefront of actually understanding from the community level what the local drivers are, what the local challenges are and what it's going to take to move communities and so we need to see the political leadership from governments in actually working actively with civil society organizations. We need to also see governments taking responsibility for effectively implementing target 5.3. While we have an agenda and a commitment this doesn't mean anything if governments do not actually actively implement it and civil society has a role to play here in holding governments accountable. And finally, we need to really get at these root causes of child early and forced marriage. It's not enough to simply here and there have an intervention that looks at one of the drivers but all interventions need to incorporate tackling wider gender inequalities to shift the social norms that perpetuate child marriage. So that is the presentation. I'd love to walk through some questions and I'm just going to leave up a list of resources that I can circulate to you afterwards as well that we have that are available for people who want to be involved in the child marriage work. Thank you so much Heather for that presentation. I would like to open the floor to questions and answers for any comments from our folks on the webinar session and our attendees here at the comment office working. We invite you to make any comments by un-muting your line and you can do that by pressing on the red button that appears on your screen on go to meeting or you can type in the chat box and we can address those questions if it's you. Heather, can you see the comments in the chat box? People are commenting your presentation. Oh yes, thank you. I was just answering one of the questions there, a private question. I'd like to ask how to deal with post-CEFN situation. I assume that means once a girl is married. So I think that that is one of the things that we're actively looking at and trying to understand better. Obviously married girls need access to services from governments and localities. For example, they need access to contraception so that they can have control over when and if they have children and to avoid pregnancy when their bodies aren't ready. In many places, married girls are not allowed to attend school. There are actually laws against married girls attending school. So those laws need to be changed and they need to be given access to schooling. And there's also a community-based change question around this which is sometimes it's not laws that's prohibiting them but custom that their families or their communities say, okay, you're married now, your job is in the home and they need to understand that they need to have that kind of access. They also need access to legal remedies. Where child marriage is illegal and they want to leave the marriage, they need to have the capacity to get divorced. So there are some legal conundrums and issues around when if they aren't officially married under law they can't officially get divorced and therefore they don't have access to the services that can support women who are trying to get out of, say, a violent situation in the home. And they need somewhere to go. So if their families reject them, we need to ensure that girls who are married who want to leave those marriages have a safe space to go to. So those are just a few of the kinds of interventions we know are needed but we actually have some internal work going in the partnership to try and identify a broader range of activities that need to occur for these girls. Thank you, Heather. Sabina, I see that you've typed in some comments providing context to your question. Does that answer your question? You can click on the red button on your screen to speak. Hi, Cherise. Hello. Go ahead. It's a great presentation. I must say it gives a global overview about the child marriage issue. I just like to say that we are experiencing some of the cases where girls who are married before the age of 18 are now facing post-marriage issues like divorce and clash or conflicts with the husband in laws and now they have no place to go as the parents and keeping in view the socioeconomic situation of those girls. And as a civil society organization, sometimes we have no option to... I mean, these options to help them out or mandates are sometimes very limited and we can't provide them shelter, though we can refer them to some shelter or protection houses run by the government. But still, the issue is very complex. So a presentation like this gives us some more guidance and provides some more ways to deal with the issues. It's the recent case which we experienced that one of the girls who visited our center previously and my colleague Sarjada just met her today and she shared with her that she tried to... she tried to take her own life and she attempted six suicide attempts recently because of the divorce and she's so young she can't handle all the social pressure and family and relatives or maybe all the people around they can't understand the trauma she's facing. So all we can provide her is some kind of counseling and a redirection or putting her through some kind of education or whatever we can do. It's just for the sharing purpose and maybe he can buy this bowl in that way because he has an extensive experience. Thank you so much. Maybe I'm taking more time. I would very much like to respond to that because there are several things that you said which I think are really critical. You mentioned the socioeconomic situation. One of the other kinds of services therefore Merry Girls is those economic empowerment opportunities the opportunities that if they're not returning to school they may be too old by that point or if there's no access to school they need alternative economic opportunities and I'm really sorry to hear about the girl who visited your center and what's really unfortunate and scary is that until I think it was last year or the year before the leading cause of death for adolescent girls in the developing world was maternal mortality. That's not true anymore. The leading cause of death for girls, adolescent girls in the developing world is now suicide and there's a Good Lancet article by Suzanne Petrone which makes the connections between child marriage and the disempowerment of girls and that increase in suicide. And the other thing that I wanted to mention is that in many countries there are child helplines that children can call to get assistance so that might be something to look into. I know that within SAIVAC which is the South Asian Apex body of Sark that is looking at child marriage that they're working directly with national human rights institutions and child helplines to ensure that there are responses for girls who are either going to be married or who are trying to leave a marriage. Thank you so much Sabine and Heather and thank you Sabine for sharing that story and Heather for those resources. And we just wanted to say actually that Sabine is speaking from this society for the protection of the rights of the child in Pakistan. For all of our girls and fire partners you know that for the context of the people joining us in the room today we just wanted to say that. We have a couple of questions that are coming on the screen so we have one from Mohammed Rizwan who is the Executive Director of Shijulai in Bangladesh and we have a question here in the room and we'll proceed with a question from Shariah in Bangladesh. So Rizwan would you like to unmute your phone and let us know what your question is? Hi, thank you for the presentation and I'd like to know why you decided to become a separate organization in 2012. It's a follow-up question that I asked before and also the second one is who started your organization and also I would appreciate if you would share more information on the work of foundation YTTO that you mentioned in your presentation. Thank you. Okay, great. So as I mentioned Girls Not Rides is a partnership with Started by the Elders. This is Nelson Mandela's group and includes a number of very prominent individuals but it's really Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mrs. Grashen Michelle, Nelson Mandela's widow who were the initial push behind this and because they were looking for a way to address that intersection of tradition, religion and the oppression of women and the consultations that they did, what they heard from people working on child marriage once they decided that child marriage was what they wanted to work on was that what they needed was not only the kind of work that the Elders actually does which is the very high level interventions of these very prominent people but they needed a network, they needed a partnership, that they needed to work and learn together and coordinate action and that was not something that the Elders was the best position to do. So instead of just being a project of this organization which is very elite and high level the decision was made to split off Girls Not Rides and to create a separate secretariat that could fundraise separately and really service the needs of our members separately so that's how we became a separate organization. So we're a registered charity in the United Kingdom but we really are a secretariat that serves the needs of our members and not kind of a separate organization with our own agenda. And then you asked about Fondacian Ito. I think we actually have a case study on their work so let me, it would be good if the organizers can share your email address and I'll check with my team and see if we have anything more on them that I can share with you. I'm not intimately familiar with their work but I'm pretty sure that we have more information on what they're doing. We actually just did a learning exchange where one of our members from another country, I think Chad, actually participated on this caravan and then took the learning back to his own organization and so I'm pretty sure that we actually can share something of what he found as well. Thank you very much, Heather and Rizwan. Heather will be sure to share Rizwan's Fondacian Ito's review and connect the both of you. Now I'd like to proceed to the next question. We have Professor Dr. Sunshine Mishra, who's an education specialist here at the Commonwealth of Learning for England. Thank you so much for the presentation. I think coming in the morning, it's what's been spent for me in the new area and it's good to learn the kind of work that he was doing and the reason that my colleagues are attending to a lot. My question could be naive because I'm not very much involved in it but I know from some of the countries that they have legislative provision about legal aid of marriage. I'm trying to understand that how this legal provision, legislative provision for marriage aid is prevalent across the countries in the world and is there any difference in those countries which have a legal provision or just a case to get married and the situation that is political provision? Do you see the difference in the problem in these countries or there are other issues to implement legal structures? Yeah, I mean it's a very good question because it's a little bit of a complicated issue. So in countries that have a minimum age of marriage that has been long standing and not enforced and they don't have the birth registration systems to enforce it, the judiciary ignores it, communities ignore it. The legal age of marriage is actually not the way that we're going to see change. So telling people that it's illegal or raising awareness that it's illegal is not an effective response in those situations because the law in the absence of all of the other interventions is just not enough and in particular if it's not being enforced. And while there is some evidence that legal changes do not lead to decreases in rates of child marriage, there's also some good anecdotal evidence that efforts to change the age of marriage actually lead to broader, more comprehensive multi-sectoral approaches to end child marriage and community awareness raising. So a number of our member organizations have worked to change their national laws to bring them in alignment with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other mechanisms that the legal age of marriage should be at least 18, which is the partnerships position that was adopted at the very beginning that there should be a legal age of 18. But it's not something that most people feel should be the focus of the work because it's not the lynchpin change agent. So sometimes it can be a very effective way of rallying around the issue and sparking a conversation about broader interventions that are needed or of raising awareness of the need to address the issue, but simply changing the law alone is never enough. I hope that answers your question. Oh, yeah. Thank you, Sanjayan. Thank you, Heather. We're now nearing the close of the hour. So we have time for a couple more questions. We see that there's a question from Shariar Alam from the Center for Mass Education and Science in Bangladesh asking about an explanation for target 5.3 of the SPGs. Shariar, I'm not sure if you'd like to unmute your phone and provide more context to that question for Heather. Hello. Hello. Go ahead. Hello, Heather. Hello. Can you please say hello? Hi, Shariar. Can you please explain the target 5.3 within the Sustainable Development Gold Order 2030? Sure. So as you're likely aware, last year the world committed to a set of global goals that everybody, every country, this is not just developing countries, will commit to achieving by 2030. There are 16 of these goals and the fifth goal is that we will work to achieve gender equality. One of the targets of that goal, the third one, target 5.3, commits to ending all harmful traditional practices including child early enforced marriage and female genital mutilation by 2030. Now, what's really important is not just that there is a commitment to the issue for the first time at this broad global level but that governments are actually accountable for progress on these goals. They actually have to report within the system of the Sustainable Development Goals to the high level panel on what their progress is and so not only they need to align their national efforts to achieving this goal but they then have to report on how they did every year so it's a new accountability mechanism and it's a new way of saying not only that the issue is really important but the governments have an obligation and for people at the national level being able to point to the Human Rights Council resolutions the UN General Assembly resolution the regional instruments and particularly this commitment in the global goals these can be important ways to go to your government and say you made these commitments these are your global commitments you said you would do it what are you going to do? I think that's great, thanks so much Heather and Charriere for asking that question the international commitment that we're all aiming to earn now I'd like to proceed to the next question from Dr. Ballet here who is the Vice President of the Commonwealth of Learning in the Ring Hi friends, this is Ballet here Hello Hi Heather there was a very good presentation very interesting you know mine is not a question but it's some suggestions and some points and some very interesting new insights which are coming in in this area first of all I wanted to check how far the demographers the population researchers are involved in your program the which researchers? the demographers and the population research experts you know because since to 1960 I have come across age at marriage is a very important area of study in the population research are they involved in your programs? we don't at the secretariat work directly with demographers and population research experts but I do know they are involved at the global level on helping to identify what are some of the indicators that for example the UN global program there is a joint program between UNFPA how are they measuring this and there are efforts to improve data collection around issues related to child marriage so UNICEF in the DHS and mixed surveys their surveys that they do with national governments collects information on the way it's structured is that it's the percentage of girls between the ages of 20 and 24 who were married before the age of 18 and the reason they collected that way is that that offers a snapshot of the prevalence rate for that given population whereas if you just measure the number of girls under the age of 18 married you could miss a girl who is currently 16 and gets married before 18 but there's a lot of other population data that's needed so was the girl pregnant before she got married how long was it after she got married did she become pregnant did she have to drop out of school so there are actually efforts to improve data collection of the Gates Foundation is very interested in this just launched a big campaign as well around these issues of child marriage thank you and there are two points which we found that in one of our studies I thought it would be obvious to you because we have been talking about women's empowerment as a very crucial for this particularly the economic empowerment but a recent study by International Fund for Agriculture Development iFAT shows that the fact that a woman is empowered economically does not mean that she's empowered at the household level there's a very crucial difference and they have come out with some interesting statistics about it and we also came across a very interesting study in Tanzania some time back that the disempowerment of men is a very important reason for the domestic violence and the status of women at the household level so the study suggests that there is a need to empower men so that at the household level the decision making process particularly the decisions regarding the life cycle decisions that could improve they also suggest that if you have to address these problems you also have to address the men and how far your program is focusing on this area so because we don't run direct programming but support the work of our members we have some case studies around work with men and boys but that's another one of the areas that we're actually looking at potentially setting up a community of practice around in the coming years I know that my team is really excited to learn from you from the Commonwealth of Learning about how you do your community of practice because we're just moving into that area one of the organizations that I mentioned the Blue Veins actually has been doing some really exciting work around men and boys but I don't know that we have a whole lot of information about that programming what I can do is look that up for you and send that over to you if you could just again I don't have the email address for everyone so if we could capture the request for further information and then I can follow up afterwards thank you thank you so much Heather and Bella now we have the next question we've got time for one more question and coming in to the closing remarks we see a question coming in from Anika who is from the Center of Math Education and Science in Bangladesh she's asking do you have any research or papers study on child early or forced marriage or any statistical documentation on the issue if you have any could you share this with us yes indeed there's a whole lot I just realized that I was answering in the chat box but sending it only to Muhammad so apologies I wanted to say thank you to everyone for all the positive feedback I really appreciate I'm glad this is useful and then on the on the studies we have actually a resource center on our website that has quite a few practical resources on child marriage so toolkit program development information etc all reports and studies page on the website which is a comprehensive set of every study that we can find on child marriage and in the resource center and other places you will find some of that overall statistical information the best one to look for are the resources done by UNICEF because the best data is coming out of UNICEF so there's a couple things from UNICEF on the site but again if anyone has very specific needs I'm happy to have my team follow-up and see what we have in terms of resources but do know that those two sections of our website we try to actually have that really comprehensive if there's anything out there that has been published on child marriage either as a resource or a study it goes up on that site and they're searchable by keywords regions languages there's quite a few materials in French so that's all available on the site thank you very much Heather and as a follow-up to this webinar we will be sharing the recording of the webinar and also a link to your website for girls not brides and the resources that you posted as well during your presentation and we'll be sure to connect you with the people that had follow-up questions and resources that were raised during the presentation now I just like to go just because we're coming to the hour there's one more question from Sifir from Bidari in Pakistan and then we'll go to the closing remarks Sifir would you like to unmute your phone and ask the question hello hi go ahead Sifir we can hear you yeah well my question was not Heather actually this other gentleman who was speaking I forgot his name he mentioned disempowerment of men and said that empowering men would help that was something new for me and I wanted to know a little more about that yeah it was a study it was a study done in Tanzania somewhere in 2011 maybe I will pass I know I will send you the URL of that study you could have a look at it it's a very interesting study that would be it thank you thank you Sifir thank you Dr. Bella and what we are going to do also after this webinar is we'll create a discussion on the girls inspired community of practice and we'll start that discussion I see that there are some comments coming in here and we can take that discussion over to that first discussion webinar on the girls inspired community of practice and we'll send that link around as well to continue to the conversation without further ado I'd like to pass it on to Mrs. Francis Ferrara here at the Commonwealth of Learning for the closing remarks thank you very much much Cherie first of all let me thank you for facilitating the session you've done a great job thank you very much to all of you who have signed in from wherever you are and also to our is it fans here at the Commonwealth of Learning of our team that supported us by being here in the room with us today because without you we couldn't have had this webinar and most importantly thank you to Heather for having made this time to speak to our partners to give us more information indeed you have done a great job so far as Girls on Brides and this is really a wonderful resource Girls on Brides is a wonderful resource to all of us whether it is about reports, whether it is about advice this is a place we can go and get more information I'm indeed very happy that you have agreed to speak to us today and I see this as a first in a series of webinars that we can arrange in the future to make follow-ups and zoom into a specific issue in this regard as it go along so thank you very much everybody I have asked Cherise to put on the screen right now for all of you to see the website of Girls on Brides there were questions about reports et cetera and Heather has responded to it but that is the link that we have shown you earlier but here is the website go there and find all the information that you need and more but also we will as Cherise said we will continue the discussion on our community of practice we will give you the links there again and we also will share the study that Dr. Bala was talking about and Safir was asking about we will also put that link so this is what it's all about for us to have a better understanding of the work that we are doing so that we can make that difference in this regard ending this cycle of child early-force marriages we don't have all the information we cannot go in there confident and talk about these issues and that is why it's so important that we read about this that we empower ourselves in this regard so with that I want to thank you all once again and remind you of the fact that we will put recording also on the community of practice the link we will send it to all of you but finally you are all welcome to become members of Girls Not Bright if you visit their website you will also see how to become a member and that will also make you stronger as the individual organization being a partner of call but also a partner of Girls Not Bright with that let me thank you once again if there's any person who has a last word now is the time because we are just one minute over the hour thank you very much thank you if there's nobody then we say bye and we see Kuntal just join us at the end of the session from Sri Lanka Kuntal we will put the recording there for you to follow us and to follow up on what was said thank you bye bye all thank you good night everyone