Under a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Advancing the Agenda of Gender Equality (ADVANTAGE) task order, Banyan Global designed and developed a resource guide to assist USAID staff and development practitioners to integrate state-of-the art approaches to child, early, and forced marriage (CEFM) prevention and response into their activities. This guide documented how the global health, education, economic growth and workforce development, agriculture and food security, gender-based violence, youth, crisis and conflict, and democracy, governance, and human rights sectors can address child marriage, including entry points, approaches, interventions and monitoring and evaluation. It also provided concrete recommendations on how to improve these approaches in the future. The Banyan Global team also developed strategies and tools to improve USAID’s approach to communicating about its work on this important subject, including an infographic on the importance of considering CEFM in multi-sectoral development work. In addition, Banyan Global’s proposed child, early, and forced marriage monitoring and evaluation (M&E) indicators allow users to track changes in the status of women and girls in a particular country, as well as the impacts of a specific program. Beyond simply disaggregating by sex, these proposed indicators assist in capturing intermediate and long-term outcomes and enable implementers to select indicators that are most relevant to their work. Collecting data related to these indicators can enable implementers to track their progress, adjust programming for greater impact, compare the effects of their program to that of other programs, communicate impact, and attract funding.

The Child, Early, and Forced Marriage Resource Guide is available online.