The Shinyanga region has one of the highest prevalence rates of child marriage in the country, where 59% of girls are married by the age of 18. Young girls are forced into marriage for a variety of reasons – both cultural and economic – that are deeply entrenched. Married to much older men, these young girls never finish school, become mothers themselves well before adulthood, and suffer a life of poverty and abuse that often goes unreported and ignored by government authorities.

Firelight began funding Agape in 2015 under its cluster of 12 grantee-partners working on child rights. Agape had been founded a decade earlier to address the devastating effect of the HIV and AIDS epidemic on children whose parents had died. Their work soon grew to include the use of public dramas, radio shows and intergenerational dialogues to work with communities to condemn gender-based violence, risky sexual behaviors and child marriage. Today they support the survivors of child marriage and young mothers with vocational training and  primary and secondary education, even giving them a place to stay while attending secondary school. They also provide girls with psychosocial services, peer support clubs in schools and training in financial literacy. Families too benefit from training in parenting skills, budgeting and saving and effective communication.

Building upon Agape’s existing strength in mobilizing and actively engaging communities, Firelight trained Agape in participatory learning and action (PLA) methodologies such as H assessments, body mapping, and transect walks. Through the process of Community Dialogues – which added participatory community mapping methodologies to Agape’s existing intergenerational dialogues – they brought together children, adults and community leaders to discuss and map out the local norms and values that were either harmful or helpful to children. As part of the exercise, participants recommended solutions for how to build upon strengths in the community and how to address persistent challenges. This participatory methodology allowed Agape to make sure that their programs were actively responding to the real needs and concerns of the community.

For instance, during the Community Dialogues process, Agape discovered that traditional healers often trick young girls into marrying older men in the community, who pay for the healers’ “matchmaking” services. These child marriages are usually agreed to by the girl’s parents, who then provide a dowry to the man. When this situation came to light, Agape decided both to directly involve traditional healers in their interventions and to intensify their parenting workshops. As a result of Agape’s efforts, traditional healers now attend all community awareness meetings on child marriage, and recently, these healers have even been informing Agape of planned child marriages. This information allows Agape to work with law enforcement to stop these marriages from happening and to ensure that girls are returned to their families and to school.

After receiving capacity building in participatory learning and action methodologies, Agape is more equipped to continuously use these processes to engage their communities in surfacing new information and solutions in the fight against child marriage.

Participatory learning and action (PLA) is an approach to social change based on the fundamental belief that the meaningful participation of beneficiaries, key stakeholders, and community is critical to more fully understanding an issue and carrying out actions for relevant, effective, and sustainable change. Firelight supports our CBO grantee-partners to implement PLA methodologies to facilitate the meaningful participation of community members at all stages of the learning-action cycle – from understanding an issue to carrying out actions to evaluating and reflecting on outcomes. With community participation and iterative learning and action cycles, community-based approaches become more responsive, relevant, and effective over time – sustaining change for children and youth both now and in the future.

We strengthen our grantees’ participatory learning and action methodologies so they can have deeper impact while actively engaging their communities in every step of the process.