As part of a joint research project on ‘A human rights-based approach to health challenges associated with child marriages in Tanzania’ (022-2022), Anne Oloo, Kata Dozsa and Wouter Vandenhole, all member of the Law and Development Research Group, spent in August 2022 a week at Mzumbe university to discuss research collaboration, offer training on securing research funding, and conducted with Mzumbe University colleagues a dissemination seminar on findings. An App to train social workers on early marriage was also launched on that occassion.
The project aims at reducing child marriage rates and its associated health challenges in Tanzania by using a human rights based approach (HRBA) with a 3-tier capacity-building approach. The first tier is capacity-building for the staff of Mzumbe University (MU) Faculty of Law (FOL) to engage in empirical socio-legal research to better understand dynamics in relation to the health challenges associated with child marriages in Tanzania. The empirical findings gathered by FOL, MU will set the ground for the second tier of the project. The findings will be used to design a training programme based on a HRBA to train social workers in the selected Dodoma region and other regions through a mobile application. In the third tier, the mobile application will be developed and used to equip social workers to become translators of international human rights standards by applying a HRBA in their interventions to deal with health challenges associated with child marriages which will contribute to the reduction of child marriages and its associated health challenges.