International Day of the Girl Child 2025: Ending Violence, Empowering Girls
On this International Day of the Girl, we celebrate the power, potential, and resilience of girls worldwide. This day is also a call to action to uplift and support girls in the ongoing fight for gender equality. This year’s theme, "Girls for Change: Breaking Barriers, Building Futures," highlights that around the world, girls are challenging stereotypes, breaking boundaries, and advocating for their futures. But they cannot do it alone. We must address global challenges such as unequal access to education, child marriage, and gender-based violence.
The Persistent Threat of Violence Against Girls
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is one of the most devastating and widespread human rights violations of our time. Despite growing awareness, the problem persists at an alarming rate. According to the WHO, 1 in 3 women worldwide experiences physical or sexual abuse in her lifetime — most often by an intimate partner (World Health Organization, 2021). Our current Gender Equality Data Collaborative (GEDC) Data Sprint shows that this violence starts early. The GEDC is a network of 83 community-based organizations in the Global South with whom we partner to develop tools and capture data to advance gender equality. As part of the VAWG Data Sprint, GEDC organizations have completed over 1600 surveys to capture the scope and scale of violence experienced by women and girls across 8 African countries. Included in these results are surveys of 246 girls under the age of sixteen. Of these, 45% reported experiencing physical violence, and 29% reported experiencing sexual violence — all before the age of 16. This cannot continue.
What Can We Do?
The girls who bravely spoke up for these surveys also voiced what services they need in their communities. They want access to counselling, improved economic opportunity, confidential health services, legal advice, and safe shelter. We can support them by:
Creating safe places for girls to be heard and include them in discussions about how to address VAWG.
Strengthening data collection and conducting research on VAWG to improve understanding of the scope of the problem.
Supporting girls’ education is one of the ACESWorld.org/GEDC most effective ways to end cycles of poverty, violence, and inequality.
Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5 requires the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls. Violence against girls is not just a girl problem — its effects ripple throughout society. Survivors often face long-term effects such as depression, anxiety, economic hardship, and difficulty caring for themselves or their families (World Health Organization, 2024).
Join ACESWorld in taking steps to end VAWG. If you are a community-based organization committed to gender equality, please consider joining the GEDC. The membership application can be found here: ACESWorld.org/GEDC. Explore our newest dashboard, which displays the data discussed here and much more. On this International Day of the Girl Child, we honor the resilience and leadership of women and girls everywhere. Join us in expanding our efforts to equip community-based organizations with the data skills and resources needed to design impactful programs and secure the funding to sustain them. Make a secure donation at ACESWorld.org/donate.
References:
World Health Organization (WHO). (2021) Devastatingly pervasive: 1 in 3 women globally experience violence. WHO https://www.who.int/news/item/09-03-2021-devastatingly-pervasive-1-in-3-women-globally-experience-violence
World Health Organization (WHO). (2024). Violence against women. WHO. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women#
