City Desk :
Community support along with integrated efforts of both government and non-government organizations concerned has become crucial to end child marriage for the sake of protecting maternal and neonatal health everywhere in the society.
Simultaneously, all the organizations working in this field should come forward and work together to combat child marriage and child pregnancy as it’s the precondition for improvement of child and maternal health.
Development activists and social watchdogs came up with the observation while addressing a networking meeting to prevent child marriage at the conference hall of Association for Community Development (ACD) in Rajshahi on the first instant.ACD, a rights-based development entity, hosted the meeting under its project titled “Ending Child Marriage through Adolescents Voice and Stakeholders Responsiveness” supported by UNICEF, reports BSS. Monirul Islam, Programme Manager of ACD, gave an illustration on the child marriage situation in the region during his multimedia presentation.
Director of Barendra Unnayan Prochesta Foyzullah Chowdhury and Executive Director of Rural Social Development Foundation Monjurul Islam Khan addressed the meeting as resource persons.
The speakers unanimously viewed that the present government under the dynamic and visionary leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been implementing diversified programmes to free the society from child marriage. Terming child marriage as gross violation of human rights he also said it is vital to increase awareness regarding the negative impacts of child marriage with the help of the mass media.
Responsive support from the community, especially local administration, public representatives, teachers, parents, marriage registrars, and influential leaders, has become indispensable to ensure adolescent-friendly reproductive health services for reducing child marriage and child pregnancy substantially and sustainable.
Foyzullah Chowdhury said ensuring equal rights on education, training, science and technology is also important to women empowerment. Overall national development could be possible when the children coming from the poor and underprivileged families will be educated and ensure all other fundamental rights they deserve.
Physical and mental development of children could be possible when they were protected from violence and deprivation.
