Solutions Brief: Entertainment Education to Address Child Marriage

This brief takes a look at what entertainment-education is and its potential for addressing a complex social issue such as child marriage.

Every year 15 million girls are married before the age of 18.1 Child marriage cuts across countries, cultures, religions and ethnicities. It exists in every region of the world, from Africa to Asia, the Middle East to Latin America, and in some communities in Europe and North America. Child marriage denies girls their rights and their childhood. It often means the end to a girl’s formal schooling and the start of her life as a wife and mother – with profound physical, psychological and emotional consequences. Ending child marriage requires long-term sustainable efforts by a variety of actors across sectors. Key interlinked strategies include: empowering girls with information and skills to able to exercise their rights, working with families and communities to understand the risks of child marriage and envisage alternatives for girls, ensuring school, health and child protection services are available for girls, and creating a supportive legal and policy environment. While efforts to address child marriage have increased, we need to do much more to see results on a wider scale. This requires challenging deeply entrenched attitudes and changing behaviours so that child marriage is no longer the norm. Mass media has long been recognized as a way to prompt large-scale behaviour change. But can it change the norms and beliefs which perpetuate child marriage?