Project Title: Building Collaboration, Partnerships and Political Commitment to Delay Early Marriage and the Onset of Childbearing in Northern Nigeria (Consortium Project)
Funder: Action Aid Nigeria
Project Period: January 2013 – January 2015
Location: Kano and Kaduna States
Building Collaboration, Partnerships and Political Commitment to Delay Early Marriage and the Onset of Childbearing in Northern Nigeria project was funded by the Ford Foundation through Action Aid Nigeria. The overarching goal of the project is to delay child marriage by reducing social and economic barriers to girls’ education. The following are the objectives of the project:
- Establish a strong and effective consortium of civil society organizations working to delay marriage in the northwestern states of Kaduna and Kano;
- Increase awareness among key stakeholders of the adverse social and reproductive health consequences of child marriage and to build political commitment (within two years) for concrete measures for its reduction; and
- Pilot government-civil society partnerships to scale-up best practices in reducing child marriage in the two states
The project was born out of one of the key recommendations made by Judith-Ann Walker of the dRPC in a document she authored titled ‘Mapping Early Marriage in West Africa’s that child marriage interventions be carried out by coalitions of civil society organizations working in partnership with government’.
dRPC’s role in the project was to provide training and technical assistance on monitoring and evaluation to the implementing partners of the project (Girl-Child Concerns (GCC), Girl-Child Education (PRHI / Bixby Center) and Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative (IWEI). The project’s target states were Kaduna and Kano states.