Girls Not Brides has recently launched two exciting resources to help members measure the progress they are making towards ending child marriage.
Measuring progress against an issue as complex as child marriage is difficult at the best of times but useful and practical indicators can help organisations track their progress, learn from successes and challenges and readjust their efforts along the way.
To help advance the conversation, we have teamed up with our friends at The Aspen Institute to develop a List of Recommended Indicators, the first comprehensive resource collating intermediate indicators to address child marriage and support married girls. A short User’s Guide accompanies this resource to help you navigate the list and select indicators that are right for your work.
Who are these resources for?
The List of Recommended Indicators and User’s Guide have been written for practitioners who are working on child marriage and are responsible for the design, monitoring, evaluation and learning of their organisations’ work. We hope the resources are accessible and useful to organisations working across a variety of programmatic areas in a range of contexts.
Which resource should I read first?
We suggest you first take a look at the short User’s Guide to get an understanding of how the List of Recommend Indicators can support your work. The User’s Guide also provides some tips that may be good to consider when selecting indicators for the work you do. This will hopefully make navigating the indicators in the list much easier!
If you are not familiar with it already, have a look at the Girls Not Brides Theory of Change on Child Marriage which maps out the critical steps needed to address child marriage and support married girls and upon which the List of Recommended Indicators is based.
When can I use them?
We hope you refer to these resources throughout your work to end child marriage but there are certain times when they may be of particular use.
For example, for programme staff responsible for designing and implementing projects, thinking about indicators at the beginning of the project cycle is a good way to ensure your activities align with the outcomes and results you want to achieve. Or perhaps your project has just undergone a mid-term evaluation and you have a chance to revise the indicators in your results framework (or log frame).
If you are writing applications for funding, why not use the resource to help select indicators that help demonstrate to donors that you have a robust and accountable monitoring and evaluation framework in place.
Think about the upcoming opportunities you have to include or strengthen the indicators in your work so you can demonstrate progress towards the objectives and goals you have set.
We’d love to hear how you are using these resources. Please drop us a line with feedback, comments and questions at info@GirlsNotBrides.org and let us know how your organisation is measuring progress towards ending child marriage.