Women’s Refugee Commission Launches New Child Marriage Project

The WRC is thrilled to announce the launch of the research project “Child Marriage in Emergency Contexts”, which is funded by Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) Program. 

Child marriage negatively impacts health outcomes for girls and their communities. It contributes to maternal mortality, as there are risks for pregnancy complications in adolescence. Additionally, marriage increases risk to intimate partner violence, which often means the end of a girl’s education and vocational opportunities, and increases a girl’s risk of exposure to sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

The project will collect and analyze data on child marriage prevalence in three emergency settings, and the information will guide prevention programming and public health interventions for married adolescent girls in emergencies.

The WRC has invested in research on child marriage in humanitarian emergencies since 2011. The WRC initially brought attention to child marriage in conflict settings with its seminal research in Uganda, and the project is the next phase of our work on child marriage.

WRC will bring together diverse organizations to implement this work, including Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, the Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World (IWSAW) at Lebanese American University, the International Rescue Committee/ Lebanon, International Medical Corps/ Ethiopia, and Kachin Development Group/ Myanmar.

The R2HC program aims to improve health outcomes by strengthening the evidence base for public health interventions in humanitarian crisis. R2HC is funded equally by the Welcome Trust and DFID. Please visit www.elrha.org/r2hc for more information.

 

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