“Am I a girl, or a mother?” Rachana Sunar opens her speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum quoting one of the child brides she has been supporting in the past four years. It is poignant to think that a 15-year-old girl could be confused about such things, but in Nepal, 40.7% of girls are forced into early adulthood by getting married by the age of 18.

The law says that the minimum age to get married is 20, therefore child marriage in Nepal cannot be tackled from a legal perspective, but by changing cultural norms and traditions. According to Sunar: “Dialogue is a process to break the silence.”

Sunar was born in 1994 in a village in mid-western Nepal, where she grew up with her six sisters, mother and father. At 15, while still in school through a scholarship programme, Sunar was told by her parents she would marry a man she had never met before. She escaped child marriage by tricking her parents into thinking that if she dropped out of school they’d have to pay the past three years of her scholarship.

“The greatest inspirations were the challenges I experienced in my own life,” Sunar says. She witnessed years of abuse by her father to her mother for giving birth only to girls. Her experiences made her determined to show her father and the community “girls are just as valuable as boys”.

In Nepal, she explains, many girls lack ambition and determination because they have seen generations of women passing from dependence on their fathers to dependence on their husbands: “They have no will to be independent, to study or to get a job and they don’t know about their career, because the authority of their lives is in someone else’s hands.”

Sunar started by simply gathering some of the girls from her community and talking to them about education, gender equality and their rights. “At the beginning they laughed at me,” she says. “It was very difficult for me to gain the trust of the community and ask the girls for their time. It was hard.”

Rachana Sunar discussing child marriage with girls in her village. Photograph: Rachana Sunar

The group became part of a one-year project called Sambad, (“dialogue”), supported by Stromme Foundation and other agencies. She talks proudly about the project’s achievements: “Six girls went to school, and if they dropped out and got married, Stromme supported microfinance activities for them, and they started their own small business.”

Although successful, the project ended because of lack of funding. “One year was not enough,” she says. Despite the lack of resources, she and her “sisters” (as they call each other) continued the project through dialogue and discussion and occasionally getting funding for microfinance training. Through her work as a teacher, Sunar pays for the activities at Sambad.

Raising our voice is not disgracing the man’s respect from the community, you already have respect. Rachana Sunar

Through conversation, Sunar wants to change the perceptions of the community towards girls. “I started to make girls empowered and to speak and say ‘No, I don’t want to get married’,” she says. A local teacher once accused her of making “women better than men”. Her response to him was firm: “Raising our voice is not disgracing the man’s respect from the community, you already have respect. If I hurt my left hand, I don’t cut my right hand to make it more similar. I treat my left hand and make both hands equal.” She plans to involve fathers in the discourse in future, though she says this will require more creativity.

Today Sambad is a centre where young people, boys and girls, work together to raise awareness about different issues affecting the country under the motto “young people are the backbone of the society”. They discuss the harmful impact of deforestation, child marriage and polygamy on their society, among other topics.

When asked how she deals with the patriarchal society, she talks about when she tried to get funding from her local municipality. “To apply for funding they asked us to bring out identity cards and legal documents,” she says. “Since we had not registered our organisation because it is so small, they would not trust us.” After discussing with the rest of the girls, they returned the next day all together. She laughs when she imitates the face of the official when he saw 45 girls, with babies, surrounding him in his office. “He was kind of afraid,” she laughs again.

Sunar has lived in Norway for the last nine months, where she has learned perfect English, and a little Norwegian. She’s been part of a youth exchange programme called Act Now, with 70 other participants from 13 different countries. It’s included lectures on global issues and cross-cultural communication, and an internship in a kindergarten. Sunar says she’s learned a lot which she plans to apply to her community back home. “[Norway] is completely different from what I am used to,” she says. “Things are so advanced. I feel like we are 1,000 years behind.”

Sunar is only 22 but says “I am considered old in my home” and laughs when told that she is young for having achieved so much. With just two weeks left in her exchange programme, she is excited to go back home carrying more knowledge and passion for her work.

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