A/HRC/41/19 empowerment and for vocational training, while dialogues have been promoted in communities regarding the consequences of child marriage and the benefits of delaying marriage and keeping children in school.34 The European Union reported on a project that it had funded in Kenya to provide life-saving protection and income generation support to atrisk refugees. The project was aimed at preventing sexual and gender-based violence within the refugee populations of Dadaab, Kakuma and Kalobeyei, and at preventing people from resorting to negative coping mechanisms, including child, early and forced marriage. 3. Empowerment of girls and emergency education linked to protection response 40. Poor educational opportunities can be both a cause and a consequence of child, early and forced marriage. Most importantly, education is a powerful tool for empowering women and girls. In humanitarian settings, providing girls with access to quality education requires innovative approaches, procedures, mechanisms and partnerships to overcome challenges that are intrinsically linked to the context (A/HRC/35/11, para. 66 (p)). Reported measures include support to families to send their girls to school, removing school fees, inkind and cash transfers and the recruitment of more female teachers. UNICEF reported that it had supported the Government of Turkey on programmes to improve the enrolment and school attendance of Syrian children through financial incentives and conditional cash transfer programmes for education. The programmes focus on 15 provinces, and had reached more than 27,412 Syrian children at the time of writing. The European Union reported that it had scaled up its funding from 1 per cent of its humanitarian budget in 2015 to 10 per cent in 2019, with approximately €1.9 billion allocated to funding education in fragile and conflict-affected countries. Another initiative, on building resilience in crises through education, had been developed using €24 million of funding to improve access to quality education at preschool, primary and lower secondary levels for girls and boys in fragile and crisis-affected environments from 2018 to 2022. It was not reported whether those programmes specifically targeted girls’ education. 41. In crisis contexts, cross-sectoral initiatives are needed to address underlying factors that disadvantage girls’ learning, for example, investing in inclusive education systems that particularly target girls with multiple dimensions of marginalization, including refugees, migrants and girls with disabilities, through initiatives such as training teachers, subsidizing safe and accessible transport and infrastructure, raising awareness and removing administrative barriers to education (A/72/218, paras. 108 and 110). In Somalia, the Finn Church Aid project offers inclusive access to quality education for 3,000 drought-affected, internally displaced and host community children in the Bay region of South West State. As the European Union reported, the project was aimed at preventing young people’s childhood being lost to child labour, child marriage, recruitment by armed groups or other life-threatening activities. 4. Enhancing community engagement with the involvement of men and youth leaders 42. Research has shown the need for the promotion of alternative models of masculinities, including through working with fathers to change the understanding of what it means to “love” a daughter and encourage a shift in mindsets from “protecting her” to “empowering her”. Furthermore, stakeholders have underlined the need to deconstruct the meaning of protection and to link it to human rights, to help families and communities change perceptions around marriage as a protection tool for girls’ safety in contexts of insecurity and violence (A/HRC/35/5, para. 35). 43. Projects in Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti have contributed to addressing gender-unequal power relations, norms and practices through men’s discussion groups, gender dialogue groups and economic empowerment programming, and have reportedly resulted in an 34 12 UNICEF, Child Marriage in the Middle East and North Africa, p. 80.