Too Young to Wed

We refuse a world where periods mean missed education, lost wages, or silenced voices. Ending period poverty is not charity—it is justice.

#PeriodPoverty #MenstrualEquity #EndPeriodPoverty #ProtectGirls

Menstruation is not the problem—inequality is.

At Too Young to Wed, we stand with girls and women around the world who are denied the most basic right to manage their health with dignity.

In Gaza alone, more than 540,000 women and girls of reproductive age are resorting to rags and sponges. Globally, 1.5 billion people lack private toilets, pushing girls out of classrooms and women away from work, stripping them of dignity and opportunity.

Blood stains the calendar, not by choice but by poverty.
Every month, two billion people menstruate—yet millions are forced to do so in silence and shame. One in four teens in the U.S. cannot afford period products.

The Taliban offers hunger or indoctrination. With your support, Zahra offers resistance through learning—proof that hope itself can be taught.

#letafghangirlslearn #girlsrights #letgirlslearn

For her, the struggle is not abstract. It is for her two-year-old daughter, for a future where classrooms open possibility instead of enforcing obedience; where no family must choose between bread and their daughters’ freedom.

But Zahra refuses to let knowledge vanish. Once a mathematics student at Kabul University, now teaching English and Dari, she gathers girls quietly in her home—an act of defiance against a regime intent on erasing them.

Today, hunger and despair are wielded as weapons. Families are told: send your daughters to Taliban-run religious schools—or lose food, work, shelter.

“Our classes give girls the chance to keep learning. They also give them hope,” says Zahra, one of more than 100 teachers we are able to employ thanks to your support—teachers who risk everything to keep education alive in Afghanistan.

We are preparing tomorrow’s leaders to step forward when the time is right — proving that even in enforced darkness, resilience and hope continue to grow.

Illustration by Fatima Wojohat

#letafghangirlslearn #girlsrights #womanrights #letgirlslearn

We are preparing tomorrow’s leaders to step forward when the time is right — proving that even in enforced darkness, resilience and hope continue to grow.

At Too Young to Wed, we are not only protecting their right to dream, we are still holding classes, determined not to lose this generation to repressive ideology.

Each login was an act of defiance, each connection a step toward a different future.

The blackout is meant to erase those futures. But Afghan girls and women refuse to vanish — and neither will we.

What the authorities call “immorality” is in truth a lifeline — the chance to study, to earn, to connect, and to imagine a life beyond servitude. These were not just lessons; they were jobs, friendships, and freedom.

First the schools were shuttered, then the classrooms emptied. Now, with the internet cut, even the last fragile space for Afghan women and girls to learn, work, and breathe freely has gone dark.

Your support brings not only clean water, but also education, freedom, and protection from child marriage.

#EndChildMarriage #EndFGM #GirlsRights #HerRightToLearn #LetGirlsLearn

With deep thanks to the Isabel Allende Foundation, The Jennifer and Jonathan Allan Soros Foundation, Luisa Fere and Brendan Iribe, for making our critical work possible.

But together, we can carry hope into Naamunyak, one drop at a time.
Every $1 you give can provide 59 liters of clean water. That is enough to fill not just containers, but classrooms, dreams, and futures.

Water here is more than survival. It is dignity, education, and resistance against child marriage and FGM.
This UN Climate Week, we recognize how deeply climate change shapes the lives of girls, how droughts steal childhoods and floods wash away futures.

But when clean water flows, the story changes. Girls return from herding to gather in shepherd schools, learning to read, to lead, to imagine a different life. Mothers, freed from long walks to distant rivers, build livelihoods and independence.

In Naamunyak, every drop of water carries the weight of a girl’s future.
When rivers run dry, mothers face impossible choices: child marriage, FGM, the loss of their daughters’ dreams.

We are proud to stand with Rappahannock CASA in supporting vulnerable girls in Virginia, and with the Marriott Daughters Foundation, whose partnership makes it possible to bring this crisis into the light.

#MMBWG #MMIWG #EquityForGirls #GirlsJustice #FosterYouth

When safety nets fail, silence closes in.
That silence must be broken—so their stories rise into view,
and their futures are guarded, not stolen.

Black girls carry the heaviest burden: just 14% of the U.S. female population, yet more than a third of those reported missing. Indigenous girls face the same dangers, but their crisis is buried twice—once by violence, and again by underreporting that erases their names from view.

This week is National Missing and Trafficked Foster Children Awareness Week, and too many girls are still vanishing into silence when systems fail them.

We are thrilled to have her leadership helping guide the next chapter of TYTW.

#HispanicHeritageMonth #GirlsJustice #EquityForAll #WhenWomenLead #HerVoiceOurFuture

After Mayor's Cruz' powerful address there, they connected and have since joined forces in TYTW’s mission to fight for equity, challenge injustice, and amplify the power of women and girls to shape history.

Mayor Cruz and our founder, Stephanie Sinclair, first met earlier this year at Harvard’s Women and Power program, which accelerates women’s leadership worldwide.

As Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico (2013-2020), she led her city through some of its most difficult moments, including Hurricane Maria, whose anniversary we marked this past weekend.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, we are incredibly proud to celebrate the Honorable Carmen Yulín Cruz Soto, now serving as TYTW’s Executive Fellow for Equity and Girls’ Justice.