
Youth are the fastest growing segment of the global population. There are 1.2 billion young people aged 10-19 around the world, and 87 percent of them live in developing countries. Adolescent girls make up half of that population, yet those 600,000,000 are too often ignored by public policymakers, private sector leaders, and commodified by impudent community members.
As a result of such political and cultural degeneration, 1 in 7 girls is married before the age of 15. And 1 in 3 is married by the time she is 18. The social cost of this practice is high, with disastrous implications for both personal growth and global development. Over the next decade, more than 25,000 early marriages will take place every single day.
"Child marriage tends to create an environment that makes young wives extremely vulnerable to physical, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse."