Fijishi aims through it’s humanitarian programme to End Child Marriage (in Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil nadu), promotes the rights of adolescent girls to avert child/early/forced marriage and pregnancy and enables them to achieve their aspirations through education and alternative pathways. The Programme supports households in demonstrating positive attitudes, empowers girls to direct their own futures, and strengthens the services that allow them to do so. It also addresses the underlying conditions that sustain child marriage, advocating for laws and policies that protect girls’ rights while highlighting the importance of using robust data to inform such policies.
Through the Programme, Fijishi is rallying efforts, building synergies, convergence and sustainability. Drawing from the learnings from initial work has worked to accelerate actions to end child marriage by enhancing investments in and support for both unmarried and married adolescent girls, and by engaging young people, including men and boys, in catalysing shifts towards positive gender norms and challenging hegemonic and toxic masculinities. Furthermore, its efforts have focused on increasing youth support, resources, gender-responsive policies and frameworks, engendering respect for laws, and improving data and evidence on what works.
In such efforts, this compendium has been developed to showcase the achievements and share the lessons learned from 6 states across India. Each learning is unique in that despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, all states stakeholders carefully adapted their course of action to strengthen partnerships, address poverty as the key underlying driver of child marriage, and leverage protection programmes for vulnerable girls while also considering their local contexts and specificities. Likewise, the Fijishi’ Programme has witnessed a significant decline in the prevalence of child marriage.
The adolescent empowerment and ending child marriage programme has certainly gained enhanced ownership by different partners. Strategic advocacy and dissemination has provided district-level stakeholders with crucial evidence needed for programme design, planning and implementation. While the programme, which is still underway, has been working successfully in the districts, the way forward is to be strengthen the systems and build capacities to address child rights issues in a holistic manner.
Fijishi is also put’ into place partnerships to advance multi-level approaches to end gender-based violence and promote gender equality. The initiative recognises the critical need to engage both boys and girls in sports to advance gender equality and entail engagement of volunteers and members from community-based youth clubs to enable them as active change makers to advance gender quality and empower women and girls, especially in communities where they are most marginalised.