Resilience through empowerment: overcoming socioeconomic and environmental risk factors for child marriage in Tanzania through a positive engagement with customs & traditions (Re-Empower)

Summary

Tanzania has one of the world’s highest child marriage prevalence rates. Child marriage, which impacts girls and young women disproportionately, is a gendered issue that various frameworks such as international human rights law as well as the Sustainable Development Goals aim to tackle. While legal approaches have focus mostly on prohibition, successful prevention of child marriage requires addressing root causes and principal risk factors and bolstering and building on people’s capacities and resources. Existing risk factors for child marriage that mainly include socioeconomic factors such as poverty, lack of educational opportunities for girls and alternatives to build livelihoods are expected to be compounded by environmental risks caused by climate change such as droughts or floods. The Re-Empower project builds on empirical findings of and the human rights-based approach espoused in a previous collaborative project on the health impacts of child marriages in Tanzania and aims to build resilience among girls and young women and their social environs by empowering them by leveraging the positive impact of customs and traditions.

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