How did EngenderHealth get involved with helping to prevent early marriage in Nepal?
We began working in the southeastern part of Nepal’s terai region, a socially conservative area where both early marriage and dowry payments are widely practiced, and maternal mortality rates are among the country’s highest. Young women and men, especially the newly married, weren’t getting the information and services they needed. With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development and with the assistance of local authorities, we focused on increasing young couples’ use of family planning and other services (like HIV testing and counseling), sensitizing health providers to the needs of adolescents, and raising community support for married adolescents making decisions about their health and families. EngenderHealth trained local peer educators and health workers to engage every tier of the community to make sure they all supported these goals. One of the key strategies was engaging mothers-in-law, which Kristof and WuDunn mention as some of the worst perpetrators of violen
