Four child marriage experts tell us their expectations and aspirations for the Girl Summit in London today

At a recent event four NGOs shared their hopes for the UK Department for International Development's Girl Summit this week, as well as their experiences campaigning against child marriage for many years and what tactics they have found successful in delaying marrying age.

Hope: leaders spend more time with people affected by their policies

I was impressed to see Justine Greening spent the whole day with the girls at the Youth for Change event. My ask is that our leaders spend time with communities in order to have appropriate policies.

We also need resources. We need funds in country at the embassy level. Yes, it's important to give funding to big international organisations because we are scaling up. But scaling up also means putting resources to the household, to the village women's group, to the urban slum.

I grew up in Zimbabwe. My mother was married when she was 15. She was grabbed out of school and married to my father. All her life she talked about education, she wanted her daughters to have opportunities in life, so this issue is very personal.

In the YWCA we invest in prevention: encouraging girls to stay in school and have life skills and age-appropriate sexuality education. We also provide emergency shelter for girls at risk.

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, general secretary, World YWCA, Switzerland and goodwill ambassador, Africa Union campaign to end child marriage

Hope: more resources on the ground

Now there's increased understanding and global attention on child marriage, I'm hoping that there will be more resources on the ground that reach the girls and more programmes brought to scale. This issue affects millions and a lot of the time projects just reach 500-600 girls.

We've been working for the past 15 years in various child marriage hotspots in sub-Saharan Africa to try and understand the most effective approaches to delaying the age of marriage.

In Ethiopia 10 years ago we did a programme called Berhane Hewan which was a package of four interventions: community conversations; provision of school materials to keep girls in school; a conditional cash transfer (a goat if the girl remained unmarried after two years) and girls groups. After two years girls on the project site were nine-tenths less likely to be married. Now we're testing the individual packages to see what could be the most cost-effective.

Annabel Erulkar, country director, Population Council, Ethiopia

Hope: an evolving relationship between donors and the grassroots

My biggest expectation from the summit will be a more mature relationship with the international community and civil society in countries. Lack of funding is one of the key issues. And we hope that the UK and other countries will use their diplomatic influence on countries that do not have legislation against child marriage.

Blue Veins is a women's group based in northwest frontier province of Pakistan. Child marriage is a big issue in Pakistan. Not only girls suffer. Boys are forced to marry much older women.

We work with religious leaders because marriages are largely performed by them. We get a mixed response. In 2014 in one of the provinces we successfully lobbied legislators to raise the age from 16 to 18. But in one of the provinces I work in we failed to change legislation, there was a strong opposition by the religious political parties. They called it a western NGO agenda. We tell them that Pakistan has signed the child rights convention and there are obligations that the country has to fulfil.

Qamar Naseem, programme coordinator, Blue Veins, Pakistan

Hope: programmes reach millions of girls

We need to focus on the kind of techniques that we know work and can be taken to scale. It's not enough to reach a few girls in one village. 14 million girls a year are married before the age of 18. That's the rough equivalent of the entire population of youth in the UK, boys and girls.

Girls not Brides is a global partnership of over 360 organisations from 60 different countries, which demonstrates how this issue cuts across regions and cultures. Our members work together to identify what works ending child marriage.

We've identified three things that need to happen. We need to have education for girls, community dialogue and a minimum legal marrying age of 18.

Heather Hamilton, interim global coordinator, Girls not Brides, UK

Hope: cooperation across all levels of government

I hope that we can influence policy at the traditional level, policy level, regions and globally. It's not going to end if we work in isolation. We need a concerted effort.

Cameroon is one of the countries where prevalence is high, mostly in the northern regions.

We engage the wives of these traditional leaders to communicate the need to end to child marriage to their husbands. We built an association called Queens for Peace International that brings all the wives of traditional leaders together to affect change. We think it's important to develop alternative approaches.

Justine Ngum Kwachi, executive director, Women in Alternative Action, Cameroon

Read more stories like this:

• Parents before they are grown-up: child marriage in Malawi

• Joining hands: why ending child marriage needs global partnership

• Child marriage in Nepal: what do you do when it's by choice?

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