The United Nations has praised India’s efforts to fight child marriage and strengthen the rights of the girl child, saying the country has shown that sustained investment and large-scale community engagement can bring “real, meaningful change”. The remarks were made at an event on the theme ‘Investing in Girl Child – Transforming Our Future’, co-hosted on Monday by the Permanent Missions of India and Sierra Leone to the UN to mark the International Day of the Girl Child.

Addressing the event, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Hannan Sulieman said the theme carried a simple but powerful message that “when girls thrive, societies thrive”. She said India’s progress matters well beyond its borders because the country is home to the world’s largest adolescent population, with 253 million adolescents.“India has shown that sustained investment, large-scale community engagement, and policy action can drive real, meaningful change. Over the past decade, girls’ education has improved significantly, reflecting growing recognition of girls’ value within families,” Sulieman said.

She added that child marriage in India has declined thanks, in part, to whole-of-government and whole-of-community approaches such as the campaign on child marriage-free India.

India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Parvathaneni Harish, outlined the country’s initiatives based on leadership commitment, mass-scale and sustained community engagement, and digital public infrastructure. He cited the ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ programme as an example of efforts to address social biases, improve welfare service delivery and increase girls’ school enrolment.“There is no doubt that investing in the future of the girl child delivers unmatched compounding returns. For example, education of a girl child ensures generational knowledge. It translates into increased marriageable age, enhanced skills, access to employment opportunities, financial stability for women- all of which cumulatively contribute to prosperous families and an increase in per capita GDP,” Harish said.

He added that focusing on the health of women and girls reduces infant mortality and improves access to health services. “Thus, they have a direct positive impact on social development and economic growth of a country,” he said. Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Sierra Leone Jeneba Bangura said that when a girl is denied education, forced into early marriage, or held back by gender bias, “we lose her potential”.

She added that when a girl is educated, protected, healthy and empowered, she transforms her life, her family, her community and her country. Harish also shared an example from his student days, saying there were no girls in his mechanical engineering class because it was seen as a male discipline. “It was an all-male mechanical engineering class because it was considered a discipline which was male. And today, almost 70 per cent of the class in my university are girls. It is making real progress in our own lifetimes,” he said.

He also pointed to current challenges in the digital space. “We only hear of ‘Tech bros’, we don’t hear of ‘Tech sisters’,” Harish said, adding that artificial intelligence was increasingly becoming a male-dominated field and that this would affect how these technologies shape thinking and everyday use. “How can we make the cyber domain a safe space for women and girls? That’s an important area for us to work on,” he said. Harish said India was working to ensure that digital tools, including digital public infrastructure, become a force multiplier for girls’ education.

“This is an area where all of us as member states can focus on, so that the emerging AI domain becomes girl-friendly and women-friendly in general,” he said, as speakers at the UN event highlighted the wider gains from investing in girls’ education, health, safety and empowerment.