Transcript Save the Children - The American University in Cairo

Working towards ending Child Marriage in
Egypt
By: Nevein Dous
Health Program Manager, SCI Egypt
June 2014
Save the Children
We are the world’s leading independent organization for Children
Founded in 1919 and works in over 120 countries
We save children’s lives
We fight for their rights
We help them fulfill their potential
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
45
40
35
30
National Average (2010)
25
20
SC Baseline (2010)
15
Target ratio by 2015
10
5
0
U5MR ratio Deaths/1000 live births
IMR ratio Deaths/1000 live births
37% of women are illiterate
57.4% of women do not receive antenatal care
67% 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.