Calling on community expertise: the role of participatory mapping in reducing child marriage in Malawi

While much of what we know about the root causes of child marriage has been determined by global north researchers, this analysis was led by communities themselves. What’s more, the method of participatory mapping not only enables community members, including children, to identify the root causes, it sets the scene for them to craft lasting solutions.

Really getting to grips with the causes of early child marriage in Malawi must mean looking beyond the research conducted by ‘outsiders’ to value the perspectives of communities – along with their unique strengths and resources – and the critical role that they play in addressing the challenges in their midst.

In 2019, five of Firelight’s partners (all community-based organisations, or CBOs) in Malawi set out to complement existing research on the root causes of child marriage by asking communities for their views and experiences of issues local to them. It was part of a learning and planning period for which the CBOs received Firelight support and funding in advance of developing a community-driven intervention plan.

CBO partners chose different participatory methodologies to engage, listen to and understand the perspectives and priorities of different stakeholder groups in their communities – including traditional and faith leaders, parents and caregivers, teachers, child protection committees and children and youth themselves.

Their headline findings around the root causes of child marriage in their community included: poverty and vulnerable livelihoods; lack of appropriate information and services for adolescents and parents regarding sexual and reproductive health and rights; traditional initiation ceremonies; gender-based violence; and the influence of media, particularly social media.

No one size fits all

However, as the meta-analysis of the findings shows (see below for the full report), the five geographical areas – which range in size from just six villages to 25 villages – saw the problem of early child marriage in different ways, attaching different levels of significance to different causes – and that’s a key point.

The participatory mapping process made clear that there is no one size fits all when it comes to understanding or solving the issues impacting on child marriage in communities. What’s more, headline findings from the communities may have broadly matched previous outsider understandings of child marriage, but outsider perspectives are likely to miss the kind of local granularity captured by the mapping process on, say, the perceived impact of local video store owners on levels of promiscuity or the impact of irresponsible chiefs secretly accepting marriage registration.

There were other important findings, with some communities not recognizing that they had a child marriage issue (and several clearly not recognizing teenage pregnancy as a major cause of child marriage despite the data from their communities that identified it as an issue).

Learning from all parts of the community, including children

Because the mapping process was driven by CBOs, they were able to connect with, and learn from, all sections of the community. Stakeholders who took part ranged from local community groups to Area Development Committee members, mothers’ groups, civil society, teachers, police and traditional healers – and children themselves.

Using a child assessment survey, the CBO research teams made a further valuable discovery that, given the opportunity, children were not only happy to be asked about issues around early child marriage, but were willing to share their innermost thoughts on the subject.

Even more positively, children were, as the report says: “…clearly able to realise the negative impact of child marriages and are ready to receive any intervention to end child marriages in the area.”

Community-driven systems change is about respecting and promoting the power of communities. In recognizing and valuing the agency of children themselves, the CBOs were able to reach deeper in their search for understanding and answers. The report observed that involving children themselves made it possible for them to actively and openly identify issues that affect them.

Paving the way for lasting solutions

Valuable findings like these weren’t limited to understanding the causes of child marriage, they helped focus on paving the way for lasting solutions, both by recognizing the part that different sections of the community have to play and by then preparing them for their roles.

For example, the mapping process helped identify the routes likely to be least effective in driving solutions (e.g., linkages to services in some communities were low and referral networks were weak so neither were likely to be useful in their current state) but also helped CBOs pinpoint mechanisms which might prove more fruitful: “The community identified the community structures that can be used to solve identified key drivers for example community policing, child protection committee chiefs and other committees.”

CBOs’ experience of participatory mapping was not without challenges or flaws. There were concerns around the framing of some questions used in the research, the reliability of some of the answers, and the resources needed to deliver the exercise. They used what they learned to improve the process in subsequent rounds.

For all this, each CBO involved was able to build better understandings of the factors which impact on child marriage in its area and of the roads they need to follow in addressing it. As the report says: “CBO partners felt that participatory mapping was a good way to get communities involved in action planning to address the issue of Child Marriage and create ownership for sustainable solutions.”

The headline recommendation that similar mapping exercises should form the starting point for community-driven child marriage advocacy strategies in other communities makes absolute sense in this context.

As the report also finds, many previous child marriage interventions have failed because the focus was on one-time messaging and not on tangible outcomes. In a nation ranked 9th in the world in terms of child marriage prevalence, Malawi and its communities will make better progress if funders and CBOs can learn these lessons and embrace approaches like participatory mapping as the key first step in delivering sustainable and community-driven solutions.

Since then, CBO partners and communities have used their findings from the mapping process to inform and guide the development and implementation of community action plans to address the root causes of child marriage. For example:

·To address the finding that girls lacked positive role models of successful women from their communities to emulate, Tikondwe CBO conducted role-modelling sessions with 408 girls from three secondary schools.
A lack of knowledge on sexual reproductive health among adolescent girls was another root cause that was surfaced during the mapping process. In response, Kadyalunda CBO trained 60 youth who then reached out to their peers in youth clubs with information on sexual reproductive health using age-appropriate fun activities such as dancing and sports.
To respond to the finding that harmful/adverse cultural beliefs fuelled child marriages, GASO CBO worked with their senior traditional leader and her chiefs to revise and enforce bylaws that prohibited child marriages in their communities.

For a copy of the Report of Consolidated Findings: Meta-analysis Participatory Mapping of Factors Contributing to Child Marriage in Malawi, please contact us at learning@firelightfoundation.org.

FirelightMay 10, 2024