Your donations will help keep young girls in Yemen safe from child marriage and famine.

Your support provides food and educational opportunities.

Call to Action

You can help protect young girls from child marriage in war-torn Yemen, where more than two-thirds of girls are married as children. Through TYTW’s proven nutrition, education, and clean water initiatives which have provided over 100,000 meals to girls in Yemen, your gift will help keep vulnerable girls in school, safe from child marriage and other forms of gender-based violence. Just $15 provides a month of school breakfasts for a vulnerable girl. For some girls, their meal at school is the only meal they will eat in a day. Food insecurity and lack of access to education are two of the top drivers of child marriage.

Too Young to Wed’s Mission

Led by renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and activist Stephanie Sinclair, the mission of Too Young To Wed (TYTW) is to empower girls and end child marriage globally. 

While child marriage occurs in almost all countries, and is not exclusive to any particular religion or society, TYTW focuses its programming in areas where child marriage is most egregious and underreported. 

Your Kindness Now = Lasting Change For Generations 

Your gift toward reducing child marriage will help to: 

• Protect girls from violence: When a girl is forced into marriage, she is robbed of her bodily autonomy, her opportunity to complete her education, and her physical and emotional wellbeing. She is subjected to early, forced, and frequent sexual relations, regardless of her own physical limitations, and more prone to serious health complications and injuries. 

• Increase girls’ lifespans: Child mothers under age 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their twenties. 

• Improve infant health: Infants born to child mothers are at higher risk for health complications.

• Strengthen academic performance and job readiness: Nutritious breakfasts for schoolchildren are linked to higher school completion rates, improved school attendance and retention, improved physical health and nutrition, improved class participation; and improved academic performance. 

• Position families for greater economic security: Girls who stay in school are better equipped to help support their families in later years. 

• Support the planet: Educated girls are more likely to make more environmentally-conscious choices, helping to reduce the effects of climate change.

You’re also driving generational change -- as each girl who evades child marriage is more likely to prevent her own children from marrying early.  

Why Our Program Works 

TYTW’s evidence-based model weaves together two highly effective, key program components to preventing child marriage: education, and food security. 

The single-most effective way to keep girls out of child marriages is to keep them in school. Additionally, increasing vulnerable families’ access to food and water is proven to bring down child marriage rates in communities.

Nutritious School Breakfasts

Child marriage is often employed by families out of financial desperation, and only offers short-term economic relief. TYTW’s school nutrition program provides girls in need with a guaranteed healthy breakfast while incentivizing parents to value education over marriage. With our grassroots partner Solidarios Sin Fronteras (SSF), we provide a complete breakfast of bread, milk, fruit, and protein (egg, tuna, or cheese), designing meals based on the recommendations of a nutritionist. 

Clean Water Initiative

As women and girls are tasked with collecting water, often from distant sources, they are at greater risk of violence. Women are most at risk of death from disease when pregnant, breastfeeding or malnourished, or because of their role as caretakers. Infant mortality has dropped significantly in the communities where we work with our partners to ensure clean water. 

Yemen is one of the countries with the least water in the world. Before the war, each Yemeni had only 125 cubic meters per year compared to 2,500 world average or 1,250 in the Middle East and North Africa. The blockade has limited the entry of the essential fuel to extract water from the subsoil, which has led to massive water shortages. Since the start of the war, the price of drinking water has multiplied 200%. Additionally, since April 2017, Yemen has experienced the largest cholera epidemic in history, and there are more than 4 million displaced people in IDP camps without any basic water supply. 

Why Yemen?

In Yemen, more than two-thirds of girls are married as children (UNICEF 2017), in what the UN has deemed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Half a million children suffer from acute malnutrition.

Among COVID-19’s many health consequences, the pandemic has increased child hunger and malnutrition as resource scarcity worsens due to economic strife. The current conflict, and COVID-19, disproportionately hurt children and child marriage rates have skyrocketed, as families become desperate for one less mouth to feed. 

In Yemen--the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula even before the war--more than half a million pregnant women are at severe risk of dying from lack of food or complications during childbirth due to their precarious health situation. The conflict has had a disproportionate impact on children and has doubled the rates of child marriages. Girls in conflict areas are often forced to marry members of armed groups, and boys are vulnerable to recruitment as child soldiers due to prolific violence. 

About Too Young to Wed and Solidarios Sin Fronteras

Too Young To Wed (TYTW) is a nonprofit organization that envisions a world where every girl can decide for herself, if, when and whom to marry; where adolescent girls are free to be children and teens with access to healthcare and all levels of education; and where all girls are free to determine the course of their own lives. To this end, TYTW’s mission is to empower girls and end child marriage globally. TYTW provides visual evidence of the human rights challenges faced by women and girls, amplifies their courageous voices, builds a global community dedicated to ending child, early and forced marriage, and inspires the global community to act—transforming influential advocacy into tangible action in the communities where the girls in our images live.

About Solidarity Without Borders (Solidarios Sin Fronteras) 

SWB, our primary implementing partner in Yemen for the last three years, is a grassroots, primarily volunteer-run nonprofit organization providing emergency assistance (food, water, blankets, and hygiene products) to Yemeni families, especially those displaced from their homes as a result of the war. Before the pandemic, SWB provided daily meals in schools as an economic incentive for families to keep their children not only educated, but also protected from child marriages and recruitment as soldiers. SWB also runs a clean water provision program, as well as a home rebuilding program. In partnership with SWB, TYTW addresses poverty and protection issues, particularly for girls. To date, 1255 children have been provided daily school breakfasts, a critical incentive for families to send girls to school over marrying them too early in the midst of war and looming famine.