Development Gateway Foundation
dgCommunities: Gender and Development
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender?intcmp=911
January 2, 2007

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1. NEW HIGHLIGHT: Supporting Married Girls – Calling Attention to a Neglected Group
2. HIGHLIGHT RESOURCES
3. NEW! DISCUSSION: Violence against women is one of the most heinous, systematic and prevalent human rights abuses in the world
4. NEW! RESOURCE OF INTEREST
5. MEMBER DIRECTORY: Update Your Profile for Networking & Collaboration
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Dear Member,

Our most sincere wishes to you. We hope the year 2008 will be a suceessful year in all personal and professional initiatives.

From the Development Gateway Gender Community

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1. NEW! HIGHLIGHT: Supporting Married Girls – Calling Attention to a Neglected Group
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(Brief No. 3: Promoting Healthy, Safe and Productive Transitions to Adulthood, December 2007 – The Population Council). In the next ten years, if current patterns continue, more than 100 million girls will marry before the age of 18, according to Population Council analyses of United Nations country data. Child marriage-any marriage that occurs before the age of 18-is considered a human rights violation by international convention.

Marriage transforms virtually all aspects of girls' lives. Typically, girls who marry are moved from their familiar home and village, lose contact with friends, initiate sexual activity with someone they barely know, and soon become mothers. While existing data cannot definitively show causal links, the literature suggests that young age and/or young age at marriage may be independently correlated with low domestic authority, limited freedom of movement, and increased partner violence.

Married adolescents comprise the majority of sexually active adolescent girls in most developing countries. However, they tend to be overlooked by both adolescent sexual and reproductive health programs, which focus on unmarried girls, and reproductive health and development programs aimed at adult women. Studies undertaken in a variety of settings reveal a range of characteristics common to married girls, including the following: 1] Less social mobility/freedom of movement than unmarried girls their age; 2] Less access to modern media or other sources of information than unmarried girls their age ; 3] Less autonomy and say in household and reproductive decisionmaking than married women aged 20–34. Young wives often find themselves with few friends, limited exposure to modern media, and less freedom of movement; 4] Increased risk of gender-based violence compared to women who marry later; 5] Uninformed and unprotected sexual relations with a husband who is likely to be considerably older-indeed, the younger the bride, the larger the age gap with her spouse; 6] Elevated risk of maternal and infant mortality for the youngest first-time mothers (those under 16 years) compared to young women who marry and initiate childbearing later; 7] Higher risk for sexually transmitted infections and HIV compared to unmarried sexually active girls.

In Bangladesh, India, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and elsewhere, the Population Council is undertaking research to better understand the situation of married girls and to more adequately meet their unique social, health, and development needs. In India, The Population Council, in partnership with the Child In Need Institute (West Bengal) and Deepak Charitable Trust (Gujarat), has implemented pilot interventions in
Vadodara, Gujarat, and Diamond Harbour, West Bengal to reduce the social isolation of married adolescent girls, to improve their reproductive health, and to increase their ability to act in their own interest (Transitions to Adulthood Brief No. 8, "Empowering young mothers in India: Results of the First-time Parents Project"). The interventions included: providing reproductive health information to married young women, their husbands,
and influential adults in their families; making necessary adjustments in existing maternal and child health services; and empowering young women through group formation and other social networking activities. More than 1,800 young, newly married women who were pregnant or postpartum for the first time and more than 1,400 young husbands received reproductive health information. The project mobilized over 1,000 girls into groups of roughly eight to 12 members. The groups take a participatory learning approach and cover topics such as literacy, vocational skills, pregnancy and postpartum care, gender dynamics within and outside the family, and relationship issues.

Text and photograph ( Burkina Faso, photo credit – Lydia Saloucou) courtesy The Population Council – a partner and Cooperating organization with dgCommunity Gender and Development.

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/highlights/viewHighlight.do~activeHighlightId=114928?intcmp=911

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2. HIGHLIGHT RESOURCES
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- Supporting Married Girls – Calling Attention to a Neglected Group. The Population Council
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/rc/ItemDetail.do~1125088?intcmp=911

- For Mayan girls, safe spaces lead to social gains - The Population Council
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/rc/ItemDetail.do~1125079?intcmp=911

- Promoting healthy, safe and productive transitions to adulthood: Population Council Overview, September 2007.
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/rc/ItemDetail.do~1125072?intcmp=911

- The role of schools in promoting sexual and reproductive health among adolescents in developing countries
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/rc/ItemDetail.do~1125064?intcmp=911

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3. ONGOING DISCUSSION: Violence against women is one of the most heinous, systematic and prevalent human rights abuses in the world
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"Every day, in all corners of the world, countless women and girls are killed, mutilated, beaten, raped, sold into sexual slavery or tortured. Most of the survivors of this violence have little hope of seeing their tormentors pay for their crimes. And so the violence goes on..."

Please share your stories of violence against women, or of activism against violence - from your part of the world.

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/discussion/default/showDiscussion.do~id=5563?intcmp=911

You can also upload them as resources at http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender?intcmp=911 - through "Add Content."

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4. NEW! Resource of Interest: World Development Indicators 2007
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World Development Indicators (WDI) publication is the World Bank's premier annual compilation of data about development. The 2007 WDI includes more than 900 indicators in over 80 tables organized in 6 sections: World View, People, Environment, Economy, States and Markets, and Global Links. Data are shown for 152 economies with populations of more than 1 million, as well as for Taiwan, China, in selected tables. Table 1.6 presents selected indicators for 56 other economies-small economies with populations between 30,000 and 1 million and smaller economies if they are members of the World Bank. Front matter, introductions to each section, and back matter of WDI 2007 are available on the report website.

http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/rc/ItemDetail.do~1124890?intcmp=911

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5. MEMBER DIRECTORY - UPDATE YOUR MEMBER PROFILE!
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With over 30,000 registered dgCommunities members, the Member Directory provides a one-stop shop for key contacts and collaboration worldwide. We invite you to take advantage of this unprecedented collaborative tool and add your profile today!

Our new Member Directory enables you to more easily contact fellow professionals in the international development community for expert advice, information, and collaboration. You will be able to find development practitioners from over 200 countries, with interests and expertise in dozens of areas, including your own! We invite you to update your member profile to let your colleagues in development know more about your interests and expertise. You'll find the profiles very useful when using the Member Directory to communicate and collaborate with fellow members on your next program or project. Log onto the dgCommunity platform by clicking http://topics.developmentgateway.org/um/user/showUserAccount.do?intcmp=911 Then, under "Manage Your Account" in the upper right, click "Edit Member Profile".

Quick Start - 4 Easy Steps:

-ESTABLISH YOUR PROFILE
Let your colleagues in development know more about your interests and expertise through your dgCommunities profile. Simply log in and go to My Gateway http://topics.developmentgateway.org/um/user/showUserAccount.do?intcmp=911 On upper right under "Manage Your Account", scroll down to "Edit Member Profile", and click "Edit this information".

-SEARCH FOR MEMBERS
Log in to the Development Gateway and go to "My Gateway". On upper right, scroll down to "Manage Your Contacts" and click "Search directory" to add new contacts. You can search by: name, country, interest, expertise, organization, organization type, or by keywords in member bios. Search Results will show you a list of members with a link to their profiles. You can also reach the Member Directory on My Gateway on the left column under "Member Services" when you scroll down and click "Directory" http://topics.developmentgateway.org/um/user/showMemberDirectory.do?intcmp=911

-COMMUNICATE WITH MEMBERS
When viewing a member's profile, click "Contact this user". This will open a message box in which you can type and send a message through our message forwarding system.

-CREATE OWN CONTACT LIST OF MEMBERS
You can build a list of key contacts and form your own network of members. Searching for members will produce a results list; you can then select members to be added to your "My Contacts" list by clicking on the plus sign under "Status" for each desired contact. Or, when viewing a particular member's profile, click "Add this member to My Contacts". Your full contact list can be viewed when you log in, go to My Gateway, scroll down to "Manage Your Contacts" and click "View your dgCommunity contacts list".

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DID YOU KNOW?
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Did you know that as a member of the Gender and Development dgCommunity you can share your knowledge resources (e.g., websites, papers, reports, presentations, images, news, events, etc) in just about any format including streaming audio and video.
Each resource will be described on a unique interactive page that will acknowledge you as the contributor and link to your profile. To view full text of knowledge resources, users will follow links to host websites, which will benefit from increased traffic from the Development Gateway community!

Simply click on the "Add content here" hyperlink at: http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender/rc/Contribute.do~flag=url~from=SampleLayout?intcmp=911

Thank you!
Anuradha Bhattacharjee
Content Coordinator
gender@developmentgateway.org
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/gender?intcmp=911