October 11 2015 is International Day of the Girl Child. The theme this year is: 'The Power of the Adolescent Girl: Vision for 2030'.
The Commonwealth recognises that girls have the right to a safe, educated, and healthy life, not only during the critical formative years of childhood and youth, but also as they mature into women.
As we observe International Day of the Girl Child, we emphasise again the importance of social, economic and political investment in girls as fundamental human solutions to breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty, violence and exclusion and addressing the unique challenges girls face around the world. Girls and young women are pivotal to helping us achieving truly inclusive, equitable and sustainable development societies.
When girls are effectively supported, they have the potential to change the world; both as the empowered girls of today, and as tomorrow’s workers and professionals, mothers, entrepreneurs, mentors, household heads and political leaders. They are agents of true social transformation.
The Commonwealth Charter sets out the collective commitment of all our member states to gender equality and to young people. The Commonwealth Secretariat takes forward this important work—promoting and protecting the rights of girls—particularly through our efforts to prevent and eradicate child, early and forced marriage. If current trends continue, in the next decade over 14 million girls will be married every year, and approximately half of these live in Commonwealth countries. This is one of the most significant and formidable human rights challenge girls face in the Commonwealth today.
The 2013 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting mandated the Commonwealth Secretariat to ‘address the issue of child, early and forced marriage, giving due consideration to the domestic legislation of member countries and relevant international law’.
In 2013 we convened the Commonwealth Roundtable on Early and Forced Marriage for representatives of member states to share best practice, gaps, weaknesses and challenges on ending child, early and forced marriage in the Commonwealth.
The Kigali Declaration, a set of seventeen practical actions to end child, early and forced marriage adopted by Commonwealth National Human Rights Institutions in May 2015, provides the framework for the Secretariat’s engagement on child marriage. This includes a variety of collaborative grassroots, national and regional initiatives.
A special session on child, early and forced marriage at the Commonwealth Women’s Forum, in the margins of Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November 2015, will be a platform for girls and young women who have survived or fled from child, early and forced marriage to share their empowering journeys and shape our efforts to promote and protect the rights of the girl child in the Commonwealth.
We join the international community in celebrating this International Day of the Girl Child and remain committed to empowering girls as the crucial transformative group for the attainment of gender equality and the sustainable advancement of their nations.
