Ending harmful practices
Project | Strategic Technical Assistance for Research (STAR) initiative to end harmful practices
Child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM) are harmful practices that deprive girls of their childhood. Both practices are rooted in deeply entrenched gender inequality, poverty, limited access to services, and harmful social norms –and both have lifelong consequences for the health, rights, and futures of girls. Each year, 12 million girls are married before the age of 18. FGM affects over 230 million girls and women worldwide, with more than 4 million girls at risk every year. These harmful practices violate children’s rights and threaten global progress toward gender equality.
Child marriage and FGM are both preventable, and ending them requires targeted, evidence-informed action. Robust evidence is critical to guide programming, policymaking and advocacy towards accelerated action to end child marriage and FGM.
UNICEF Innocenti – through the STAR Initiative (Strategic Technical Assistance for Research) – is contributing to accelerated efforts to end child marriage and FGM by strengthening the evidence base in order to inform and guide programme implementation, and support policy change. Launched in 2021, STAR aims to accelerate efforts to end harmful practices by strengthening the generation, use, and impact of evidence to guide programming and policy.
Defining a shared global research agenda to prevent and respond to child marriage
UNICEF Innocenti and the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to end Child Marriage are steering a process alongside key partners including Girls Not Brides and WHO to define global research priorities to end child marriage. The process over 2025-26 involves taking stock of evidence progress, identifying current and pressing research needs and priorities, strategically targeting key decisionmakers to ensure linkages between research and policy impact, and continuing to build momentum for evidence-based action towards preventing and responding to child marriage. It involves consultative exercises with researchers, practitioners, policy makers and change advocates through participatory mechanisms to ensure the global agenda reflects regional and national needs and priorities.
Learn more: Shared Global Research Agenda on Child Marriage
Publications
Approach
UNICEF Innocenti’s Strategic Technical Assistance for Research Initiative has been set up to support the Global Programme to end Child Marriage and Joint Programme to Eliminate FGM to leverage the power of evidence to accelerate action to end child marriage and female genital mutilation.
Our work spans the following strategic areas:
- Generating robust and actionable evidence on harmful practices and effective interventions—this includes examining emerging challenges such as harmful practices in humanitarian contexts, the role of gender-responsive social protection, and the gender norms that sustain these practices.
- Strengthening national and global research capacities by providing tailored technical support to identify evidence gaps, design impactful studies, and measure progress.
- Promoting research uptake and use by building ecosystems for knowledge exchange—this includes developing evidence platforms, supporting translation and dissemination, and fostering collaboration between researchers and decision-makers.
- Shaping shared research agendas: Collaborating with partners to align investments around priority evidence gaps and drive collective learning.