Engaging Male Caregivers to End Early Marriage in Lebanon: Training modules to accompany programs with adolescent girls

The Danish Refugee Council Lebanon (DRC Lebanon) and the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) identified a gap in their programming for, and with, adolescent girls. During the initial phase of implementing tailored “safe space” programming for different groups of adolescent girls (e.g., younger, older, in-school, out-of-school, married), field teams and girls themselves routinely requested more engagement with fathers. The initial program phase (2014-2015) engaged mothers but did not include a structured and complementary set of group sessions for male caregivers. 

The primary audience for this curriculum is staff at DRC Lebanon; it was developed to equip staff with a step-by-step roadmap for engaging fathers of adolescent girls in a structured, complementary, and meaningful way. The secondary audience is humanitarian and development actors who are implementing non-formal educational programming for, and with, adolescent girls in Lebanon. 

These trainings are intended to be used with groups in a workshop setting. The learning activities included in the eight modules of this curriculum aim to give male participants the foundation of knowledge they need to transform their thinking on masculinity in order to promote gender equality and lower the risk of early marriage for children. The learning activities cover a range of issues and use a mix of training methods and tools to encourage participants to reflect on and explore these issues as they relate to their own experience.