Three prominent women philanthropists — Michelle Obama, Melinda French Gates and Amal Clooney — joined forces this fall to boost the Girls Opportunity Alliance’s Get Her There campaign, an initiative of the Obama Foundation that aims to help girls realize their full potential.
Together, they intend to help girls everywhere fight gender inequality and find their own paths, particularly by means of education, something that Amal Clooney said was not a given growing up in Beirut, yet formed the basis of every achievement that has followed in her life.
Like most global issues, the challenge of helping girls stay in school was exacerbated by COVID. Around the world, over 100 million girls are currently closed out of educational systems — an enormous problem.
Yet the three philanthropists are taking things a step further by tackling a complicated, entrenched issue that will take every bit of their well-known resolve to address: ending child marriage. Of the 100 million-plus girls missing from classrooms worldwide, an estimated 10 million disappeared as child brides. Discussing the situation, Melinda French Gates noted the long echo of their missed contributions across every level of society.
Here’s more on what each leader is bringing to the table to help philanthropy find solutions to this seemingly intractable problem.
23 girls a minute
Each year, 12 million girls are married before they turn 18. That equates to 23 girls a minute — nearly one every three seconds. The issues surrounding the practice are complex, rooted in gender inequality, and fueled by factors like poverty, lack of education, insecurity and cultural norms.
Child marriage is defined as any formal or informal union where at least one party is under 18. It’s considered a form of forced marriage if one or both parties have not given full, free and informed consent. The laws against it are a mixed bag. Some countries consider underage unions a crime. Others take legal measures through civil, criminal or family law — or no local action at all.
“Child marriage is a significant barrier to girls’ access to quality education,” said Dr. Faith Mwangi-Powell, CEO of Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage. “Once married, girls are very unlikely to remain in or return to school, as they face greater household and caring responsibilities, stigma, forced exclusion and gender norms that keep them at home. At the same time, investing to keep girls in school — especially secondary school — is one of the best ways of preventing child marriage and promoting gender equality.”
Early marriage often denies girls their rights to health, education and safety. Those who marry young are much more likely to drop out of school early and have children early. They typically experience higher levels of violence from their partners. And in the end, their families, communities and civil society as a whole lose out on the full potential they represent — a dollar figure the World Bank puts at $500 billion a year.
Sum of their parts
The three champions’ commitments include advocating for organizations that work to end the practice and advance gender equity, advancing litigation to end laws permitting the practice, and creating and sharing evidence and insights that broaden an understanding of the ways child marriage holds girls back.
Each brings a unique perspective to the work. Michelle Obama, founder of the Girls Opportunity Alliance at the Obama Foundation, brings years of expertise leading social change movements — and great sway on the world stage. Amal Clooney, cofounder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, brings a legal advocacy approach to the work. And Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brings the force of the world’s largest global philanthropy and a concerted interest in the topic that dates back more than a decade.
Building alliances, the Obama perspective
Former First Lady Michelle Obama founded the Girls Opportunity Alliance at the Obama Foundation four years ago. To date, the alliance has funded 54 projects based at community-based organizations in 20 countries, including Malawi, Cambodia and Peru, and provided resources to boost and inform their work.
Over the next five years, the alliance’s Get Her There campaign will continue a global call to action to support adolescent girls. In all, the initiative expects to fund more than 100 organizations around the world while growing its leadership networks. That includes the recent addition of 12 new community-based organizations in countries like Kenya, India and Colombia.
The alliance’s work with foundation partners like the India-based Milaan Foundation helped raise its awareness of the issues around child marriage, and drove engagement.
The Milaan Foundation arms young girls between the ages of 12 and 18 with the life skills they need to develop into leaders. During the pandemic, Damini, a 16-year-old program participant, saw girls in her community being pushed into child marriage. Newly equipped with the knowledge and negotiation skills she learned though the foundation, she became their advocate and rallied her community to stop the practice. As a result, several of the girls were kept from dropping out of school.
The alliance’s capacity to empower girls like Damini is expected to grow as it expands. The Milaan Foundation alone has already reached more than 40,000 girls and community members in rural India. In the coming months, it aims to reach 1,000 more.
Waging justice, the Clooney perspective
Child marriage — and any marriage without the free and full consent of both parties — is a human rights violation. Leaders in the fight against child marriage consider establishing progressive legal frameworks an essential part of the response, in concert with policies and programs that boost the autonomy of young girls.
Amal Clooney co-founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which “wages justice” to protect human rights against some of the most dangerous perpetrators on the planet. Today, it provides legal and evidentiary support, as well as strategic litigation in more than 40 countries.
Clooney’s involvement in the Girls Opportunity Alliance builds on a well-established track record of promoting and defending the rights of women and girls through the courts. Earlier this year, the foundation launched the Waging Justice for Women initiative, which employs data-driven strategic litigation to overturn discriminatory laws and practices that hold women back, and drives accountability for gender-based abuse.
Challenging the laws that permit child and forced marriage is among the initiative’s key priorities, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the highest levels of child marriage occur. This is urgent work. If current trends continue, rates are projected to double on the continent by 2050.
Despite the devastating impact that child marriage has on the social and economic development of women and girls, research shows that at least 40 of the 55 African Union states either explicitly allow child marriage or provide sweeping exceptions based on parental consent or state authorization.
The Waging Justice for Women initiative is currently working with African partners to “challenge these laws in national and regional courts, and to engage in collective advocacy to encourage more governments to bring these laws in line with international treaties that they have ratified.” Another tactic is expanding legal fellowships and women-for-women legal aid clinics to create an environment where future gender justice champions can thrive.
The foundation is already having an impact. In 2021, its work alongside local partners challenged Tanzania’s policy of banning married and pregnant girls from school in a landmark case before the African Court of Human Rights. The advocacy resulted in a U-turn by the Tanzanian government, reversing a discriminatory policy that impacted more than 1 in 4 girls of high school age.
The foundation hopes that the powerful collection of women leaders and organizational experts will be a force multiplier, allowing more young women to decide their own futures.
Accelerating advocacy, the Gates Perspective
Melinda French Gates, one of the world’s most formidable philanthropic champions for women and girls, came to the issue of child marriage more than a decade ago when she began grappling with challenges around family planning while working on her book, “The Moment of Lift.”
The book dedicates an entire chapter to issues of child marriage, titled “When a Girl has No Voice.” Preparing for the book launch, French Gates reflected on the organizations doing great work in the area and decided to help them accelerate their efforts.
As a result, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed Girls Not Brides, a global partnership to end child marriage, by helping create the Child Marriage Learning Partners Consortium. The consortium helps build new evidence and insights on the issues, including those generated by partners like Fraym, UNICEF and UC San Diego’s Center on Gender Equity and Health. The vehicle for knowledge sharing and measurement also spurs more strategic and effective action, and provides formal networking opportunities and grantee convenings.
Initial findings from the consortium’s research, advocacy and implementation partners include the importance of context in addressing the problem, the significance of legal reform, and the need to change social norms to improve the social agency of married girls.
Gates also opened an accelerator platform to align funding with action through the Girls First Fund. Established in 2018 in the face of a dearth of general funding, the fund has attracted partners including the Ford Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF).
Specialist partners
Both Girls Not Brides and the Girls First Fund and will be collaborating on the new Gates-Obama-Clooney commitment to end child marriage.
Founded by social change leader Mabel van Orangje, Girls Not Brides is one of three global organizations that work together to build a multipronged strategy to end child marriage.
A global partnership of more than 1,600 organizations from more than 100 countries, Girls Not Brides is a movement-builder, influencer and knowledge hub founded in 2011. VOW for Girls, meanwhile, was founded seven years later to mobilize individuals, brands and the global wedding industry to raise funding and awareness. The Girls First Fund, also founded in 2018, is a donor collaborative that seeks to add resources to the fight against child marriage.
Over the last decade, Girls Not Brides’ progress has been driven by donors including the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Ford Foundation and the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the third-largest private charity donor in the world. Postcode Lottery’s support totaled €4.5 million since 2015, and is expected to push to €5 million — or more than $5.25 million — by the end of 2022.
The only real failure
At the kick-off event for the alliance, Obama, French Gates and Clooney were asked what advice they’d give their 25-year-old selves.
Michelle Obama said she’d tell her younger self to believe in the light inside of her. Melinda French Gates said she’d advise herself to stay true to the confident achiever she was back in high school — and still tries to channel. And Amal Clooney said she’d tell her younger self that the only real failure is the failure to try.
Child marriage is a problem that channels deep-rooted misogyny and long-held cultural norms. It will take a high degree of faith and confidence to put an end to the practice and find ways to empower the 10 million girls lost to child marriage. But together, the three philanthropists are trying.