AAI Partners with Too Young to Wed

Too Young to Wed (TYTW) is a visionary nonprofit founded and led by renowned photojournalist and activist Stephanie Sinclair.  TYTW’s mission is to protect girls’ rights and end child marriage by providing visual evidence of the human rights challenges faced by girls and women.  For nearly fifteen years, Stephanie Sinclair and Too Young to Wed’s award-winning photographs and films have regularly appeared in the world’s leading publications, including National Geographic and The New York Times, and in partnerships with the United Nations and several national governments, educating communities and lawmakers alike and bringing unprecedented global awareness of the epidemic of child marriage.

TYTW also works directly with child marriage survivors and at-risk communities.  Their Tehani Photo Workshops bring girls together in an empowering retreat setting where they work together telling their own stories, learning coping skills to process their trauma, and becoming empowered to develop into tomorrow’s leaders in the fight for girls’ rights.  To help ensure these and other girls have an opportunity to break the cycle of child marriage and create a brighter future for themselves, TYTW provides Leadership Scholarships in several of the countries in which they work, including their newly launched vocational education program in war-torn northern Nigeria.  This program will enable adolescent girls who recently escaped from captivity and who are unable to participate in traditional education programs to develop their technical capacity, entrepreneurship, and business skills to compete in the labor market through a tailoring vocational training initiative.

TYTW’s advocacy efforts included a visit this spring from two Boko Haram survivors, who traveled to the United States to share their stories with 37 members of Congress as well as representatives of the Department of State and the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women.  Press coverage of their visit, through stories like National Geographic’s, and through the girls’ own words during their interview on PBS Newshour, garnered significant support for their cause.  This visit resulted in the recent introduction of a bipartisan Senate resolution condemning Boko Haram and urging strong US support for survivor services for the thousands of girls who have suffered at the hands of this terrorist group.  As Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said, “This resolution recognizes the extraordinary bravery of the survivors of Boko Haram, two of whom I had the honor to meet with last month to listen to their stories.”  A corresponding bipartisan resolution will soon be introduced in the House of Representatives, recognizing the impact that these brave young women had on all the members of Congress with whom they met, and ensuring that the plight of all the girls being held in captivity will not be forgotten by the world, and that help will soon be on the way.

To donate miles to support To Young to Wed CLICK HERE