The Hunger Project Bangladesh recently led a community-wide event to raise awareness of the harmful effects of child marriage and to highlight The Hunger Project’s commitment to empowering women and girls.
Around the world, 39,000 girls get married every day. This is a challenge in low-income countries like Bangladesh where one in three girls are married before the age of 18.
Participants of the community event presented information about child marriage, expressing their opinions and their priorities – opening up a dialogue about a long-held community issue. The session successfully ended with a joint pledge to reduce child marriage from 81 percent to less than 30 percent in their community.
The event, which took place as part of The Hunger Project’s involvement in the Her Choice Alliance, saw volunteers and staff members share new data about child marriage in communities across Bangladesh. Her Choice is an alliance of organisations that are working to halt child marriage in 11 countries, with the long-term goal of creating communities in which girls and young women are free to decide if, when and whom to marry.
At The Hunger Project, we believe in measuring what matters. Our philosophy of monitoring and evaluating our community-level programs is centred on the understanding that empowering individuals and communities with knowledge, information and opportunities is essential for achieving sustainable self-reliance and ending hunger.
All of our programs are monitored through a participatory monitoring process. This means that we start with grassroots, community-led engagement to close the feedback loop between our projects’ performance and community expectations and goals. Objectivity is key, so we embed transparency and accountability for data throughout all of our monitoring and evaluation processes.
Learn more about how The Hunger Project ends hunger and poverty in Bangladesh.