Regarding your editorial (The Guardian view on child marriage: girls should not be wives, 26 August), every year, 12 million girls are married under the age of 18, while more than 70 million more are estimated to be at risk of child marriage between 2025 and 2030. Yet, as international development budgets face unprecedented contractions, traditional field programming alone cannot keep pace.
At current funding levels, international funding for ending child marriage amounts to less than $1 per girl at risk per year – a level of investment that cannot match the scale or urgency of the problem
Ending child marriage requires dismantling the patriarchal norms that perpetuate it. Over eight years of participatory research across Bangladesh, India and Nepal – engaging 350 grassroots partners – our team validated a cost-effective alternative: narrative edutainment. Field-testing a film-driven intervention yielded a striking 49.4 percentage point shift in community attitudes, proving visual storytelling can transform entrenched behaviours where policy alone stalls.
Through our film project, we are establishing a scalable model combining cinema, school toolkits, community screenings and policy briefings to reach 100 million people across south Asia, with a clear blueprint for expansion into sub-Saharan Africa.
Child marriage inflicts a staggering $175bn economic cost worldwide yearly. In an era of scarce global funding, investing in scalable-impact film assets is an urgent necessity. This vital tool can break the cycle of poverty and protect millions of young girls.
Ravi Baral
Activist film-maker and co-founder, Far Too Young Inc
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