Refugee girls use collages, music, and flowers to help find an end to child marriage
Before global travel came to a halt with the COVID-19 pandemic, Julie Freccero and I spent the month of February visiting two refugee settlements in the West Nile Region of Uganda. The trip was part of a two-country study — in both Uganda and Jordan — to understand what NGOs, government institutions, communities and other actors can do to prevent and respond to child marriage in humanitarian contexts.
For this research, we traveled more than 700 miles by road from Kampala to Bidi Bidi and Palorinya — two refugee settlements near the South Sudan border that are home to nearly 400,000 South Sudanese refugees. Bidi Bidi, the largest of the two, holds 270,000 refugees, making it the second largest refugee settlement in the world. In both camps, refugees have fled violence from more than six years of civil war in South Sudan, which has claimed the lives of some 300,000 people. As in many refugee communities around the world, child marriage is an ongoing challenge in these settlements. While no one has recorded the number of girls impacted, South Sudanese refugee girls in Uganda recently told Plan International that child marriage was the number one form of sexual and gender-based violence they experience.
In the settlements, we had the opportunity to sit down with adolescent girls, their parents and caregivers, community leaders, humanitarian practitioners, and government officials to learn more about child marriage in emergency contexts. We explored four primary questions: First, what are the drivers of child marriage? Second, how are decisions made about the marriage of girls? Third, what are the support needs of adolescent girls and their parents or caregivers? And finally, what are some community-driven solutions to child marriage?
To find answers, we worked with an incredible Ugandan research team — our lead research partner Clare Bangirana and four research assistants from the West Nile Region (who spoke at least six languages each!), as well as multiple dedicated Save the Children staff in each location. Together, we conducted traditional interviews with approximately 50 girls ages 14–17, 40 parents and caregivers of adolescent girls, and multiple community leaders, religious leaders, healthcare workers, police officers, educators, humanitarian practitioners from local and international NGOs, and government officials, in both settlements.
However, we also wanted to find more creative ways to engage girls. To do this, we chose youth-centered participatory research activities that empower girls to share their experiences, while also providing them with something interesting and engaging to do in spaces that often have limited activities or programming for girls. These were done in workshops with more than 120 girls, ages 10–17 in both settlements. What did these workshops look like?
In each workshop, we provided girls with magazine clippings and glue to make collages showing a girl in an early marriage and starting discussions on the impacts of marriage on the lives of these imaginary girls. We also gave them colorful pens and paper to draw flower maps describing who they turned to for help in marriage decision-making. Finally, we held musical chairs-style discussion groups to talk about girls’ support needs and possible solutions to addressing early marriage in their communities. These activities, chosen by youth advisory groups in each location, gave the girls fun, creative ways of expressing themselves and allowed them to have some ownership over the research process. After the workshops, many girls shared how much they enjoyed the activities and the opportunity to voice their opinions and needs, while also learning from their peers.
In each settlement we visited, girls, their families, and their communities repeatedly expressed the urgency and importance of addressing child marriage in refugee settlements. As we return to the U.S. with their stories and insights, we are more committed than ever to using what we learned in Uganda to improve services and support for girls and their families in humanitarian settings and to ensure that every girl has the right to be a child.
