materials. It also convinced a food catering business not to cater for child marriage ceremonies.
For Care and AJWS, the logical route is to work through local partners familiar with regional conditions and practices, and based where the pressure points are. For the local NGOs, it shows they are not working alone on a difficult problem only now receiving the attention it merits.
The UN high-level panel appointed by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, to look at development targets to replace the millennium development goals when they expire in 2015, has urged the recognition of child marriage as a key indicator of female empowerment. In another sign that child marriage is moving up the development agenda, Girls Not Brides, the global partnership to end child marriage, was formed in September 2011 to tackle the problem.
Empowerment can come through that catch-all term, livelihoods training. Groups such as Brac, the Bangladeshi NGO, for example, have created clubs in Uganda where young girls learn to develop confidence through storytelling and songwriting. They also learn more practical skills, from financial literacy and tailoring to agricultural work.
Backed by AJWS, Mohammad Bazar Backward Classes Development Society in West Bengal takes a similar approach. The organisation, which works with marginalised Muslim and tribal women and children in urban Kolkata, runs a school for girls as well as vocational training for women in the rural area of Birbhum.
"We work to build girls' aspirations, promote girls' ideas of themselves when they don't have aspirations, and engage with key decisionmakers — parents, teachers and religious leaders," said Javid Syed, Asia programme officer for AJWS.
AJWS helped change Zeenat's life. It provided her with vocational training, allowing her to become financially independent and diminishing the likelihood that economic need will turn her towards another abusive marriage. If Zeenat does marry
again, the hope is that she will have the support of her family and the ability to leave the marriage if she chooses, in full knowledge of her rights.
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