What Adolescent Girls want: Priorities and Solutions…

Adolescent girls' rights are in crisis – from sexual violence and child marriage, to gender gaps in education, employment and training, to teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality rates - a leading killer of 15-19 girls. Investing in adolescent girls is a proven strategy to yield multiple dividends: for girls directly, for their families and societies overall. Yet adolescent girls continue to be largely invisible or low priority in most national budgets and investments plans, both for domestic and ODA financing, with limited resources going towards programmes and services for adolescent girls. 

Adolescent girls are also rarely consulted in global and national negotiations and decision-making processes, despite their powerful advocacy on a range of issues from child marriage, to climate change. Against this backdrop, across the SDGs global progress for adolescent girls is stagnating or even regressing.

In this urgent context, UNICEF, the Government of the United Kingdom, the Government of Sierra Leone, We Are Purposeful and UN Women will come together with girls and young women advocates from Mali, Peru, Dominican Republic, Nigeria and the USA to shine a spotlight on adolescent girls' priorities for change, and concrete solutions that we can accelerate to protect and promote girls' rights.

The findings of a new global poll on adolescent girls' rights will be shared, through which over half a million adolescents and young people shared their policy priorities to advance girls' rights. In a fiscally constrained environment, cost-effective, evidence-based programme solutions will be presented, with a call to action to partners around the world to fund, implement and scale up these solutions and invest in adolescent girls – the right thing to do, and the smart thing.