How SI Digital Advocacy Lab Helps Sara & Her Team in Their Work against Child Marriage

Sara El Outa from Lebanon is a civil society leader and alumni of our leadership programme SI Leader Lab. As an alumnus, Sara participated in SI Digital Advocacy Lab, where she and her team learned new methods and tools for implementing digital campaigns linked to Agenda 2030.

We talked with Sara about her SI Digital Advocacy Lab experience.

What was the campaign that you and your team worked on in SI Digital Advocacy Lab about?

We worked with "Notbefore18", a campaign against child marriage in Lebanon. In the campaign, the organization I work for:” The Lebanese Democratic Women's Gathering” (RDFL) advocates a unified law that requires one to be of age to be able to marry. Today, there are various laws that regulate the age for when you can get married, and this has led to an increase in the proportion of child marriages.

What did you want to achieve with the campaign and how did it go?

The aim of the campaign was to raise the discussion about a unified law by focusing on those who survived child marriage. We chose to describe the effects that child marriage has on the victims' education, future and mental health. The campaign consisted of films and posters and was spread via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and local TV channels. The campaign was widely circulated on social media and some films were watched by over 200,000 people. The campaign resulted in a committee in Parliament resuming the discussion on child marriage. 

Can you share something that you learned through SI Digital Advocacy Lab?

For us, "Design Thinking" was the most important method we learned. For example, we learned to test our idea on our target audience to see if it would work the way we intended, and after receiving feedback, we adjusted the idea. I have also used the methodology when working on other campaigns.

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