Problem

Rural youths are unaware of the consequences of CEFMU. However, simply bringing awareness of CEFMU to rural youths isn’t enough because they don’t feel a connection to it.

Insight

The more you know someone, the greater the emotional connection you have with their situation.

Idea

Storytelling is a way to build connections. Through a story, we can get rural youths to learn more about CEFMU victims – allowing them to better empathize, understand and avoid the negative consequences.

Avoid My Ending

We encourage our band of eager activists to volunteer and make an actual difference by gathering stories from girls in CEFMU. Activists are invited to visit Plan International’s Youth Action Platform to sign up as the key drivers of the campaign. They will go to the rural regions and have a conversation with anonymous victims of CEFMU, piecing together stories that will tell unmarried rural youths of the negative impact CEFMU brings. To protect their identity, we utilise AI to generate a girl that represent these girls, giving a face to a story that rural youths can empathise with.

To gain awareness of the stories of CEFMU among the rural unmarried youths, we start with an intriguing, mysterious OOH that piques their curiosity. The content of our OOH is hidden at first, with the copy placed at the eye-levels of the youths.

The call to action QR code will direct them to a Whatsapp chatbot, where they can learn the story of a girl as they interact with it.

Youths do not have access to strong internet access in rural areas. Hence, Whatsapp is a tech-friendly, 2G platform where they can easily access with minimal boundaries. In the chat, youths get to pick questions to further continue the story, as more of the visual appears.

Again, the focus is on telling rural youths the stories of those who have gone through CEFMU, and we do so both through words and the striking, slow reveal of the OOH visual. This sustains their interests in the story, while driving empathy through different mediums.

At the end of the story, we give the rural youths the opportunity to take action and seek help for CEFMU. They can simply click “yes” to be directed to a live chat with an urban youth activist who can advice the rural youths to understand the negative consequences of CEFMU, learn to say no to child marriage and know the authorities they can contact.

To boost the awareness beyond the rural youths, the generated AI pictures are shared on Plan International’s Instagram page. A sponsored up close picture intrigues users to learn more about her story. In the page itself, we see a mosaic collection of all the different AI generated visuals who each represent a real victim’s story.