Thirty years after the Beijing Declaration, legal inequality persists across the world. Words & Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable in the Beijing+30 Review Process, the sixth edition in our Words & Deeds series that began in 1999, exposes that governments have failed to repeal or amend sex-discriminatory laws and highlights the urgent reforms needed to achieve full legal equality for women and girls.
The report includes:
The 4th UN Conference on Women in 1995 gave birth to The Beijing Platform for Action, the most progressive blueprint ever for advancing women’s rights. Governments worldwide pledged to change or remove their existing discriminatory laws and make legal equality a reality. Nearly 30 years later, that goal is far from being realized.
The 4th UN Conference on Women in 1995 was the birth of The Beijing Platform for Action, the most progressive blueprint ever for advancing women’s rights. Governments around the world pledged to change or remove their existing unfair laws and make legal equality a reality. But that goal is far from being realized.
Child marriage remains a global crisis, affecting 12 million girls each year, with 650 million child brides worldwide—40 million of whom are in the MENA region. Despite the scale of the issue, only a fraction of cases are reported annually. Conflict, displacement, and the COVID-19 pandemic have further worsened the situation in the region. In response, Terre des hommes (Tdh) has developed the Child Marriage Model of Action (MoA), a regional framework designed to guide effective, evidence-based interventions.
This report considers the growing adversities faced by women and girls in conflict-afflicted countries across the Arab region, noting that younger girls are increasingly disadvantaged due to exposure to violence in their communities and heightened perceptions of insecurity; this includes child marriage. Moreover, child marriage has been linked to the transmission of intergenerational disadvantage.
In Understanding the Relationship between Child Marriage and Female Genital Mutilation, UNICEF outlines how child marriage and FGM are distinct but often interconnected harmful practices that violate girls’ rights. Both are deeply rooted in gender inequality and social norms and are prevalent in many of the same countries, particularly in parts of Africa and the Middle East. There is a need for a deeper understanding of how these practices relate to one another to improve the effectiveness of interventions aimed at ending both.
Investing in data and generating and disseminating evidence on what works to prevent child marriage is essential to developing smart, effective policies and programmes that lead to large-scale change. This publications catalogue compiles research and evidence pieces published in 2020 and 2021 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) headquarters and regional and country offices, as well as by our partners around the world.
There is not enough evidence yet on the impact of the pandemic on child marriage globally and in the Middle East and North Africa/Arab States (MENA/AS) region. Nevertheless, it is estimated that up to 10 million more girls will be at risk of becoming child brides in the next decade as a result of COVID-19.
Plan International and UNHCR have been collaborating since 2021 to improve the support we provide to girls who are at risk of child marriage, as well as ever-married girls.1 The collaboration focuses on the prevention and response to child marriage across both child protection (CP) and gender-based violence (GBV) sectors in three different refugee and mixed displacement contexts. This brief summarises the main lessons learned from the project.
While there is clear evidence that education helps delay child marriage, less is known about which specific education policies and programs are most effective in achieving this.