This child marriage campaign for UNFPA Asia Pacific struck a line through a script that traditional sayings have long used to tell girls in Southeast Asia what they are worth and what they are for.
Southeast Asia is home to roughly 93 million women who were married before their eighteenth birthday. That number is staggering and stubbornly persistent. In fact, poverty, gender inequality, and limited access to education keep the practice alive, often cloaked in the language of tradition and respectability. Sayings passed down through generations tell girls what they are for, and what they are worth. Changing those numbers means first changing those words.
When UNFPA Asia Pacific came to us as part of a global joint initiative with UNICEF to end child marriage, the brief was clear in its ambition: challenge the cultural norms that make child marriage feel inevitable to the communities that practice it without alienating them.
We took traditional sayings, the kind of phrases that have long been used to justify marrying off girls young, and as a result paired them with empowering alternatives. A literal strikethrough cut through the outdated text on screen, replacing it with a message about education, choice, and the future a girl gets to define for herself. The visual grammar did the arguing so the copy didn’t have to.
The result was a campaign that felt native to the platforms it lived on: punchy, shareable, and rooted in the emotional logic of the region. Girls have the right to education, to safety, and to determine their own futures — and that is exactly what the campaign asserted. Furthermore, by working within the vernacular of traditional wisdom rather than against it, the creative gave communities a way to see the shift — not as a rejection of their culture, but as the fulfilment of every girl’s rights within it.
Developed in close collaboration with UNFPA’s and UNICEF’s regional teams, this Southeast Asia campaign balanced advocacy rigour with social media instinct. It demonstrated that rights-based messaging doesn’t have to be abstract to be powerful — that naming a violation clearly, and therefore offering a vision of what respect for girls’ rights looks like, can move people more effectively than any dry policy argument. Sometimes the boldest response is a single line through a single sentence.
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