Roughly 93 million women in Southeast Asia were married before their 18th birthday. The number is staggering and stubbornly persistent. In fact, poverty, gender inequality, and limited access to education keep the practice alive, often cloaked in the language of tradition and respectability. Sayings passed down tell girls what they are for, and what they are worth. Changing those numbers means first changing those words.
A child marriage campaign to challenge cultural norms
When UNFPA Asia Pacific came to us as part of a global joint initiative with UNICEF to end child marriage, the brief was clear in its ambition: challenge cultural norms that make child marriage feel inevitable to the communities that practice it without alienating them.
We took traditional sayings and paired them with empowering alternatives. A literal strikethrough cut through the outdated text on screen. We replaced it with messages about education, choice, and the futures girls gets to define for themselves. The visual grammar supported the text.
A child marriage campaign built for social media
The result was a campaign that felt native to the platforms it lived on: punchy, shareable, and rooted in the emotional logic of the region. Girls have the right to education, to safety, and to determine their own futures, and that is what the campaign asserted.
Developed in collaboration with UNFPA’s and UNICEF’s regional teams, this Southeast Asia campaign demonstrated that rights-based messaging doesn’t have to be abstract to be powerful. It showed that naming a violation clearly, and offering a vision of what respect for girls’ rights looks like, can move people more effectively than dry policy arguments. Sometimes the boldest response is a single line through a single sentence.
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