2013
The Kendeda Fund begins investing in American Jewish World Service (AJWS) as a partner in the effort to prevent child marriage in India. Over the next decade, The Kendeda Fund entrusts AJWS with $50 million to transform the field of child marriage and the lives of girls in India. AJWS launches its work by commissioning an Indian feminist organization to conduct a landscape analysis of early and child marriage (ECM).1
2014
The landscape analysis reveals a hyperfocus on age at marriage and neglect of root causes, especially the control of girls’ sexuality as a key driver of child marriage in India. It highlights that child marriage is a symptom of patriarchies that limit the life choices of adolescent girls and young women (AGYW). Merely delaying marriage until the legal age (of 18 years for girls and 21 years for boys in India) does not change the quality of AGYW’s lives. This leads AJWS to redefine the problem of child marriage “from age to agency.” AJWS decides to focus not on age at marriage, but AGYW’s agency to determine their lives.
2014
AJWS begins to build a grantmaking portfolio of social-movement embedded, grassrooted2 organizations working to challenge the root causes of ECM in India— gender inequality, control over AGYW’s sexuality, and the inevitability of marriage as the final goal for girls. AJWS’s Four A’s Approach prioritizes AGYW’s agency and aspirations, as well as the availability of an enabling environment to access resources and services. This new approach is political in that it aims to challenge and redistribute power, giving AGYW greater agency in their own bodies, relationships, lives, and communities.
2014
Realizing that age at marriage does not capture real success in this work, AJWS initiates participatory feminist research as a monitoring and evaluation process. AJWS partners with the women’s studies center in an academic institution and 29 grassroots grantee partners. Together, they map change and define success from the partners’ standpoints, as they carry out interventions using a root-cause approach to ECM.
2015
AJWS recognizes that research and learning are critical to a deeper understanding of AGYW’s lived realities, and commissions research on key gaps. These include collectivizing girls, a media landscape analysis, and a mapping of social movements to understand their work with AGYW. AJWS invests in a significant research grantmaking portfolio to increase knowledge in the field and enable informed programmatic innovations.
2015
AJWS decides to focus programmatic grantmaking on collectivizing girls, addressing sexuality as a driver of ECM, supporting capacity and perspective building for grantees and filling gaps in knowledge. AJWS’s strategy centers on supporting organizations that facilitate women’s collectives to expand their work to AGYW, and collectivizing girls to build their agency and increase their individual and collective power to negotiate and challenge social norms.
2016
AJWS’s revised strategy integrates advocacy as a key element to the program that can take local voices to global platforms. International advocacy on sexuality and early and child marriage gains momentum, and AJWS convenes an expert meeting on the topic.
2017
A mid-term assessment using the Outcome Harvesting process helmed by Ricardo Wilson-Grau allows AJWS to understand the contributions, strengths and challenges of our social change objectives, and to refine our second phase strategy. The midterm evaluation demonstrates impressive wins at the individual girls’ level in agency and aspirations and suggests a need to increase focus on access to and availability of resources.
2017
AJWS rallies leading global and national organizations in the fight against Child, Early and Forced Marriages and Unions (CEFMU) to form the CEFMU and Sexuality Working Group (SWG).
2018
Based on the Kendeda-supported research-for-action grantmaking experience, AJWS makes a pioneering contribution to the field of understanding how gender transformative research can support change.
2019
AJWS continues to bring girls’ voices, grassroots voices and evidence from partners to global platforms. As co-chair of the Sexuality Working Group, AJWS collaborates with multiple organizations to collate innovative ways to challenge taboos around sexuality programming practiced by grassroots organizations. The Tackling the Taboo report launches at the Women Deliver conference in Vancouver in 2019 and is brought to the world through a series of webinars and in-person events, including at the ICPD+25 conference in Nairobi.
2020
As COVID-19 impacts the world, AJWS partners—and especially AGYW they work with—play a leading role in community relief efforts during the lockdown caused by the pandemic. The SWG makes a call for funders to stand with and for AGYW during COVID.
2020
The Indian government fields a proposal to raise the age of marriage for girls to 21. In response, AJWS and partners join and co-lead a consultative process with young people to hear their points of view and facilitate their representation and participation. The resulting Young Voices National Report highlights what young people really want from the government to enable their voice, agency and power.
2020
AJWS expands AGYW grantmaking to two other countries: Kenya and the Dominican Republic. This leads to new dimensions of programming and advocacy work to incorporate the realities and challenges our partners there confront. Racism, adolescent pregnancy and restrictions on sexual and reproductive rights become more prominent themes. Across the three countries, investing in the leadership of young feminists and their active presence within movements and organizations becomes a priority.
2021
AJWS and partners sharpen their focus on gender-responsive resources for AGYW, and building an intersectional, feminist response to CEFMU that centers agency, empowerment and an enabling environment for AGYW’s rights. The need to establish visions and indicators of success beyond age of marriage, as demonstrated locally by partners in India, is reinforced by international members of the Sexuality Working Group. The SWG publishes a letter to the editor in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
2022
AJWS makes important conceptual breakthroughs in the sector with:
- A feminist framework to challenge the root causes of ECM that impacts multiple domains of change, not just age at marriage, co-created through the monitoring and evaluation process.
- A conceptual framework on sexuality and CEFMU authored by the SWG, co-chaired by AJWS.
- A policy brief on how child marriage laws are harming adolescent rights in practice.
2022
A discourse analysis shows that AJWS played a critical role in calling global attention to a key, neglected driver of child marriage: the desire to control AGYW’s sexuality. In investigating the factors that led to a change in the global discourse on child marriage, the researchers concluded that AJWS was a catalyst. In particular, the study validates our strategy of bringing grassroots feminist voices and perspectives into dialogue with influential global stakeholders. (See a summary of the research here.)
2023
A survey by AJWS of partners‘ reach shows an exponential expansion of the number of girls mobilized through AJWS grants. AJWS support helped partners double the inclusion of girls from 13% to 27% of collectives participants between 2016 and 2023. With AJWS’s grantmaking and accompaniment support, our partners also increased their attention to and inclusion of the most vulnerable AGYW. This included membership in collectives for over 8000 out-of-school girls, a 25% increase between 2016 and 2023, and over 17,000 young married girls, a 652% increase over the same period. AJWS also supported the inclusion of members of religious minorities, disadvantaged castes/tribes and people with disabilities Together, our partners in India collectivized over 250,000 youth across the country.
2023
AJWS invests in a rigorous external evaluation of girls’ collectives: the principal gender transformative approach taken up by our partners in India. The evaluation shows tangible, transformative results for girls. For example, collective members that have a strong understanding of how gender inequality affects their lives have also successfully negotiated with their families to respect their marriage choices and/or continue their education. AJWS-supported collectives also contribute to increased access to and availability of needed resources and services, such as safe restrooms in schools, transportation for students, and playgrounds. Importantly, collectives create a safe space that supports AGYW in building networks of trust and solidarity. Of the 728 girls surveyed, 92% felt a strong connection to other members of the collective and 88% felt that they had a safe space to discuss issues that affected their lives. AGYW who felt a strong connection to the collective and felt the collective provided them a safe space were more likely to have taken part in collective action. This finding highlights that the support and solidarity of the collective are key to change.
2023
AJWS takes the lead in reframing global conversations on funding AGYW’s rights and the participatory funding practices that are needed to support them. AJWS and partners continue to elevate the issue of how minimum age of marriage laws are working, or not, to prevent CEFMU and advance girls’ rights.
2024
As The Kendeda Fund sunsets after three decades and more than $1 billion of grantmaking. AJWS is proud to have been a close collaborator and part of their incredible journey. With a more focussed mandate, AJWS will continue to work in India, Kenya and the Dominican Republic furthering the 4As of AGYW and strengthening youth and girls’ movements for their voice, agency and rights.
1 Child marriage takes place whenever a boy or girl marries before reaching age 18, but most of these marriages involve older adolescents. In addition, many young people over the age of 18 face intense pressure to marry earlier than they want to. To reflect this reality, this document primarily uses the term “early and child marriage.”
2 Organizations with deep ties to grassroots and communities.
