Learning from Child Activism: Stopping Child Marriages in Bangladesh & Ghana

Children and young people are standing up to make a change. They are not waiting to be invited by adults to participate in policy debate, but are making and claiming these spaces.  This report explores the engagement of child activists in Bangladesh and Ghana to stop child marriages for themselves and their peers. This research was undertaken with child activists, which had grown out of longstanding participation groups, Child Forums in Bangladesh and Children’s Parliament in Ghana, supported by World Vision local offices. When starting the researching, child activists reported that they had stopped 72 marriages and, in Ghana, child activists there said they had stopped five marriages. The research did not seek to verify these numbers but are provided here for a sense of scale; the research did verify that the children were perceived by themselves and others as having taking (often successful) action to stop child marriages.