By: Antoinette Abbah
Ghana has witnessed a substantial decline in the practice of child marriage, bringing hope as the country approaches the deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Recent data reveals that only one in five young women aged 20 to 24 were married before the age of 18, a notable improvement from the troubling statistic of one in three about a decade ago.
This positive trend marks a significant step forward in securing a brighter future for Ghana’s youth and underscores the nation’s commitment to fulfilling the SDGs’ vision for a more equitable and just society.
In a collaborative effort to end child marriage, the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, and the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF recently organized a five-day workshop in Cape Coast under the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage.
The workshop sought to address the critical drivers behind harmful practices affecting children, focusing on child marriage, adolescent pregnancies, and related issues.
To achieve this, participants, including implementing partners and stakeholders from various ministries and sectors, engaged in a co-creation process to develop a consolidated set of tools. Central to the workshop’s objectives was the development of a Social Behavior Change (SBC) playbook
UNICEF Social Behavior Change Specialist, Charity Nikoi, said the playbook will serve as a global resource, enabling country and regional offices to effectively tackle child marriage through adaptable, sustainable, and scalable interventions.
She added that the playbook emphasizes a human-centered design approach geared towards empowering communities to play an active role in ending child marriage.
“In this Social Behaviour Change Playbook Workshop, we are using the human centered design to end child marriage which we designed together with the community. We targeted adolescents, parents and community leaders and so on. We are looking at what happens to each of these personas when it comes to child marriage. What are the contributory factors, the root causes. We designed what is cost effective and appropriate for them to use” she said.
“We wanted our partners, that is CSOs and government institutions, to know about the new strategy for SBC that we have added to the basket. The human centered design is one. A lot of the participants were very excited to be part of this new approach” Madam Nikoi added.
UNFPA Programme Analyst, Gender Based Violence, Faizal Bawa, while praising Ghana’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, stressed the need for further action to achieve the SDG targets in the country.
“Basically, we are looking at tools we can use better in the communities, looking at various target population that we work with, parents, adolescent girls and boys, traditional leaders, family heads. How do we ensure that knowing the importance of our community system, we are able to target all these population with information to be able to address issues of child marriage. This workshop is timely because we are going into the third phase of the global programme to end child marriage which starts from 2024 to 2030. This will give us the opportunity to use some of these tools in the third phase next year”.
One of the facilitators of the Nucleus Group, Shaz Bhola, emphasized that the primary objective of the co-creation workshop is to adopt a listening-first approach. Unlike traditional agendas driven by predefined goals, the workshop encourages engagement with communities to better understand their needs and concerns on specific topics.
“The target of the workshop is largely to practice a listening first approach . So, generally, when we go into communities, we might have a site agenda of things that we need to accomplish on a particular topic. We then look at behavior of drivers for instance, where there’s overlap between an issue like child marriage which is the harmful practice we’re focused on. But then, when we listen to the community’s understanding of what their concerns are and what the drivers of those overlap”
A total of 44 participants from civil society organizations, public sector, UNICEF, UNFPA and representatives from Guinea Liberia and Sierra Leone came together to forge a unified path towards ending child marriage.
They visited two communities in Abrem Essiam and Essuekyir ,all in the Central Region to practice a rapid inquiry method with personas of different ages, gender perspectives and roles. After the field visit, the participants developed and tested prototypes which they shared with the personas. Some participants shared their views after the workshop.
First Vera Allotey from the Department of Community Development in the Eastern Region, who said the workshop was very inciteful.
“I was a bit curious because I wanted to find out how the play book would look like, and how we are going to use it to interact with the community members. My expectations have been met however, not fully. I thought that besides testing of the prototype some validations would have been done, there are some few gaps that would have to be filled. However, it’s been good so far. There is a good side and I’m happy to have been part of it” she said.
A Public Relations officer of the Light Foundation, an NGO, Imam Yussif said the group and field work have been very helpful.
“I was also curious and expecting to learn. When they started the workshop, it was so engaging, we were united and I liked the session of presentation, group work and field work. I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve learnt how to approach people systematically but I think there’s more room for improvement. When we talk about the tools, it’s not that clear so I think they can do better when it comes to the issue of tools that we can use on the field. Though you can see what they are using, you’ll have to ask a myriad of questions. They have done very well. I enjoyed it and I’m happy to be here”, he added.
The outcomes of this landmark workshop hold the potential to reshape the future for countless vulnerable children. By co-creating innovative and effective solutions, the international community takes a step closer to realizing a world where child marriage becomes an archaic practice.
