Working towards ending Child Marriage in Egypt

By: Nevein DousHealth Program Manager, SCI Egypt

June 2014

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We help them fulfill their potential

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Save the Children

Situation of Egypt’s Children:

• A good quarter of Egypt’s 90 m people live below the poverty line (compared to 21.6% in 2008/2009) and 23% of children under 15 years live in income poverty

• 5 million children are deprived of appropriate housing (shelter, water, sanitation), and 1.6million under 5 years suffer health and food deprivation

• An estimated 2 million children deprived of home care and are living on the streets, facing numerous forms of violence, hardships and exploitation

• An estimated 1.6 million children are in hazardous work

• Lack of quality and relevant basic education, including poor school infrastructure, unsafe schools and poor education systems

• High rates of unemployment among youth, especially girls and young women

Situation of Egypt’s Girls, a closer eye:

• More than 91% of girls and women 15-49 years old who have been cut (FGM)

• Inequitable access to education services for girls and poor children with more than two million aged 6 to 18 have never attended school

Health Indicators and Facts

U5MR ratio Deaths/1000 live births

IMR ratio Deaths/1000 live births

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

National Average (2010) SC Baseline (2010)Target ratio by 2015

37% of women are illiterate57.4% of women do not receive antenatal

care67% of community members do not have

official Identification Papers

Save the Children’s work to end Child Marriage Due to the critical impact of child marriage, Save the Children aims to address child marriage across all our core programs through different education, health and child protection interventions which incorporate a holistic approach of :

• Legislations and policies: Advocacy and media for sharing lessons learned at multi-levels of national, regional and globally

• Community-based : Address social norms, awareness raising, collaborates with local stakeholders, religious and natural leaders

• Child and youth participation, Peer support, Adolescent training, livelihood opportunities

• Parental education

Be the Innovator

• Through our Ishraq Plus, a non-formal education programme adolescent girls aged 10-15 living in rural areas receive life skills training and access to support and services.

• The Arab Women Speak Out Session employs community mobilization strategies where groups of local women work social and health workers to disseminate messages on a range of women’s empowerment issues including FGM/C.

• CHOICES project engages 10 to 14 year old girls and boys in reflective activities that challenge restrictive and inequitable gender norms and promote gender equality and an end to child marriage. In 2010, qualitative and qualitative findings documented that girls felt empowered to talk to their parents about continuing their studies and avoiding early marriage and boys advocated with their parents for their sisters’ education and delayed marriage.

Be the Innovator

• PROMISES engaged community members in discussion using posters which promoted gender equality. In 2012 an evaluation found husbands became more positive in their view of their daughters’ ability to contribute to the community in the future and expressed increased understanding of the need for their daughters to be physically mature before marriage.

• Building on this success, a further innovation was created in 2014 called VOICES which directly engages parents of children from the CHOICES intervention to speak out about the benefits of gender equality and so prevent early marriage through peer led behaviour and attitude change amongst other parents.

Programs’ Highlights

Maternal and Child Health

• We work to ensure that mothers and infants survive and stay healthy during pregnancy, childbirth and early childhood in the most disadvantaged areas in Egypt where services are most lacking and the majority of deaths occur.

• We strengthen the capacities of healthcare providers; we improve their skills and invest in improving local health care facilities.

• We also work with families to improve their health and nutrition practices; we raise their awareness and encourage them to adopt healthy behaviors and seek out quality maternal and neonatal care.

Rural- Urban Challenges

• Service availability and accessibility• Community structure• Community needs• Socio-economic differences• Community leaders and

players• Environmental hazards (high voltage- garbage collection areas)

 

Successes

Marriage and Consanguinity:

• The percentage of reported early marriage increased in the three governorates from 40% to 52% in Sohag from 24.5% to 30.4%in Assiut and from 23% to 48% in Cairo.

• Increase in the percentage of women who believe that girls should be married before the age of 20.

• More women believed that men should marry after the age of 20.

• There is positive change the views of women towards consanguinity except in Cairo where women had positive attitude towards consanguinity increased from 29% to become 45.7% .

Family Planning

• More than 97% in Assiut and almost 95% in both Cairo and Sohag has positive attitude toward family planning.

• 85% of the surveyed women in Cairo were using contraceptives, followed by 52% in Sohag and 45.5% in Assiut compared to (72%, 25% and 45.5) during the baseline respectively.