Difret X is a collaboration between Mehret Mendefro and Zeresenay Berhane Mehari (the creative team behind the award-winning feature film Difret), Girls Not Brides, and NAMAC. The core of our interactive effort will be an online portal that facilitates a transformative “megalogue” between a critical mass of child brides around the world. For the first time, the young women will be able to ask questions to each other about their experience, and bear direct witness to one another. In the Innovation Studio, NAMAC will bring together a technology and strategy team to guide, evaluate and share the process of transforming the breakthrough Question Bridge:Black Males platform for this new sector.

The Difret filmmakers and Girls Not Brides have partnered on an outreach and engagement campaign that will leverage these untold stories to generate a new understanding of the issue of early marriage—and build on the authentic experience of those most affected—the brides themselves. Their questions and answers will serve to introduce a very new context for a global conversation; by placing hundreds of faces to the issue, can we change the ways early marriage is perceived and can we stop it—in a single generation?