You.

Every year, 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18, a practice the UN has said will.

Take 300 years to eradicate on child marriage.

Now, three of the world's most high profile humanitarians have vowed to tackle the issue together. But is this an impossible task? I've come to join Michelle Obama, Amal Clooney, and Melinda French Gates on their first field visit together to Malawi, a country where 42% of girls marry under the age of 18, to ask them why they've chosen to unite on this issue and if it can be solved in our lifetime.

You Michelle Obama. Thank you so much for speaking to us at BBC Hundred Women.

Thank you for being here. It's my pleasure.

So we're here to talk about the work you're doing to end child marriage along with Amar Clooney and Melinda French Gates. Why is that an issue that's important to, you.

Know, I've said this time and time again, I see myself in, in the girls that we're fighting for. You know, I see my daughters in those girls. If we just put ourselves in those girls shoes and think of how would we feel if it were us or our daughters that were married off at the age of twelve or ten or however old, and their dreams, their opportunities and aspirations were cut off completely. Married to an older man, forced to start having children way before their time. Any of us would be outraged at the thought and if it were our children or grandchildren, we would move heaven and earth to make sure that that didn't happen. We would make sure we were protecting our daughters and our granddaughters. And I can't not feel that for every girl around the world.

I remember I met some young girls in Ethiopia a number of years ago and they were between ages nine and eleven. I mean, you look at a nine year old that is a child, we think of a 15 year old still and she is a young adolescent, but a nine or eleven year old is a child. And they told their stories of how they would go out to fetch water and they'd come home and there was this arranged marriage. They'd try to run away and they couldn't.

We don't have an international system that can prevent this type of behavior against women and against girls. Then at least we should try and punish it when it happens and through punishment try to deter it. But the large scale international organizations that we have that are supposed to be dealing with this, like the UN Security Council, like powerful governments are not delivering. And so I think philanthropy then, and individual lawyers can play and have to.

Play a larger role because how urgent an issue would you call this? Because the UN has said this will take 300 years to end. Scary figure.

300 years is not a tolerable time frame. This is an urgent issue. The health of women and girls on this planet measures the health of our planet, and we can do better. This is an issue that can be solved tomorrow. If all the world leaders got together and made it a priority, it wouldn't take 300 years. It could happen in less than a generation.

As part of their visit, the trio.

Have attended a school in central Malawi.

In a district where a third of.

Girls fall pregnant under 18. They're collaborating to fund local projects with the aim of keeping more girls in school.

When I was your age, there were people in my community that didn't think a girl like me, who didn't have money or wealth or connections, could do the things that I did. I even had my second form teacher tell me that I shouldn't apply to the colleges I applied to because she didn't think I could get in. So I ignored her and I applied to Princeton. I got in and I went to law school and became a lawyer. And I've worked at a university, I've run an NGO, I've done all sorts of things. So I know that there are so many girls like all of us, all over the world, where people are underestimating them. They're telling us what we can't do. And I refuse to let any more girls feel that they're not worthy of the investment, because I know what's inside of you.

One of the things that you've done as part of your work and advocacy is visit Malawi and you were in a district that has very high rates of child marriage, and you went to a school there and you met young girls there. What surprised you most about that visit?

I can't say at this stage that I'm surprised because I've traveled around the world and I've seen girls like these everywhere. But what brings me the most joy, inspires me, gives me optimism, is the light that's still in their eyes, the smiles on their face, the hunger that they have to make their lives better. You would think that you'd walk into a school like that and there would be a lull, a dullness, a depression. There are a lot of people who might assume a lot of negative things about schools like the Lutze school, but you walk into those schools and you see power, you see intellect, you see ambition. We tend to think that poverty and people who are disadvantaged, it has a certain look. It's a corrugated roof, it's a mud hut, it's a place without running water or sewage. But abuse and neglect and underinvestment can happen in some of the shiniest cities in the world.

Almost everyone we speak to says that poverty is the number one issue for child marriage. It's to make sure that their daughters can eat, have a life. But an issue as big as poverty doesn't feel like it's an issue that we can solve. Is this an unsolvable problem? Is this too big for us to tackle?

This is a solvable problem. The rates are coming down when real work gets done. It's really a social norm problem. It's that first of all, if you're a family that's in poverty and so let's say you are scraping by and you don't have food in the house, why do they think about selling the girl child? Why aren't they thinking about selling the boy? Why is it acceptable to sell your daughter for $15 and it's not acceptable to sell your son? Are you really looking for a better life for her or are you looking for a better life for your family? And quite often when you really spend time with these families, they're trying to feed the other children in the family, but they're valuing their sons. This is the truth more than their daughters. The only way to change social norms is at the community level. You get the community thinking differently about the girls. When you get enough villages standing up and saying no, then you start to bring the rates down. And that kind of social change takes educating everybody, figuring out who the leaders can be that can stand up. But it takes a family and a community to stand up.

Our foundation, we wage justice and we say it's waging because you actually can't just assume it's going to happen. You have to sort of form alliances and really sort of fight against these kinds of injustices with the determination that it takes to win a war. And one of the things that we see in Malawi is it's not so much about changing the law on paper, because actually Malawi's laws are fairly progressive when it comes to girls'rights, but it's about access to justice, where what's the point of having a beautiful constitution that protects girls from child marriage if the girls who are the victims of this don't know about it? So we formed a network of mobile legal aid clinics, which means literally, there's a van that goes out with lawyers and we go out in a community and say to girls, these are your rights, and if you need a lawyer for free to protect you, that's what we are here to provide.

It's illegal to marry under the age of 18 in Malawi, but since the law was introduced six years ago, there have been very few prosecutions.

This is actually the first time we've been able to reach this part of Malawi. We are focusing on child marriage because we know this is a big problem.

In this part of Malawi, outreach is one practical solution. Her foundation funds female lawyers across the continent, including the Women Lawyers Association of Malawi.

We're going to try and meet with as many people as we can this afternoon, including in private sessions, but you can also call the Women Lawyers Association of Malawi anytime by just dialing 3081.

And it was extraordinary. We were in an area that we'd never been able to reach before. In Malawi, this was the first legal clinic dealing with child marriage. We didn't really know if anybody was going to show up, and 1200 people did. And we had so many follow on consultations during the course of the afternoon where girls said, I'm 14, I have a child, what can I do? And lawyers are taking down their case.

That's the issue, because the law is there, but there's still such a high rate of child marriage.

Exactly.

And the marriage happens in an informal setting with a tribal chief and a parent.

Exactly. So, I mean, I think the law is a part of the solution. So the first thing was for Malawi to change its law. So it did say the right thing on paper, which they did, and the rate has gone down since then, but not enough. So giving people access to the courts, and this is what we do, is fight for girls'rights in the courtroom. That's going to be a big piece, but we're also not naive enough to think that's the only piece we have to form alliances. So at this clinic in Malawi, we also had tribal leaders there, they helped us to convene people and they're going to be helpful as part of the solution. We've had many chiefs, female chiefs actually over 100 of them got together in Malawi and said, we will annull any traditional marriage that has taken place with a child. And there's one in particular called Chief Kachindomoto, who has annulled so many child marriages that they call her the terminator.

There is a lot that follows you when you come, and then there's a lot of attention that goes and shines a light on the girls. And then when you leave, it's almost like the light can kind of leave that environment. And do you think about, because these are communities that have been badly let down as well, do you wonder what.

Effect it is to I think about that every day, and one of the ways that I can personally control that is to make sure that those kind of interactions aren't a one and done kind of thing. I learned that in the very first solo trip that I took as First Lady. I went to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school in Islington in London, and I think my husband was there for a G summit. I don't know, it all gets but I said, I want to be out in the community. I just don't want to sit in the hotel with the rest of the White House press. I want to go out and I want to see what's happening. So I spent a day, this amazing school that was comprised of mostly immigrant girls, and I spent the day, and at the time, what I'm traveling around with is nothing compared to what was traveling around with me when I was First Lady. I had a brilliant day with these amazing young girls. And I felt what you felt. It's like we turned the school upside down and it was a powerful day, but that's not enough.

We have to stay connected to these girls. And so we did. We set up calls, we invited some of the girls to the White House. What I can do is make sure that it's not just a one time thing, because I understand what you understand, that these girls have been let down a lot, and I don't want to be another let down for them. Like, I can't fix their problems, but I can be the person that comes back again and again and again in big ways and in small ways. So that's something I think about every time I interact with a child on a big way. It can't just be a one time opportunity. We can't be just another disappointment.

And another thing that you did when you were in Malawi was you went to a school and you gave a speech on stage when you were at school and you said a couple of things that stuck with me. One of them was, you know, the lesson that I had was that I went to school, I went to university, I got a career, and then I got married later in life. And could you speak to how the girls reacted to and I think the.

Message was, you should have the choice. And I said, you should decide whether to have a family, when to have a family, who you want to marry, what kind of work you want to do. And they were very ambitious, and I was really impressed with them. They might not want to wait till their late 30s, but hopefully they'll have more freedom than they have now.

We've had a decade of talking about the girl boss, the singular woman who knocks down barriers, but not really sort of women working together. Do you think this new decade is more about us sharing our resources as women and creating a new momentum?

Women, I think, actually naturally work in collectives. I see it over and over again and it's interesting. I've talked to a number of women who are older than me, who maybe they made it as CEO or they made it to CFO in their company. And there's some regret that they didn't do it in concert with other women. They didn't pull other women up and along with them. It's an easy myth that people like to have of oh, the singular girl boss. There is nothing we don't do in teams. I studied computer science in college. It's a myth to think it's one white guy coding. I was in computer science. We all worked in teams. It's teams that create new things, right? If we can come together as a threesome, we're going to get instead of one plus one plus one equals three, we're going to get one plus one plus one has this multiplier effect of 6789 because we're working in collective, doing the same strands of work but also putting them together.

There are going to be a lot of people listening to this and watching this and reading this saying this is not my problem. Child marriage has nothing to do with me. It's not in my community. I can't see know I don't need to engage with this. What would you like to say to those people?

Disinvestment in women and girls is all of our issue and it impacts us in the United States. We're dealing with a rollback in reproductive rights, things that people thought they could take for granted, things that my girls thought that they could take for granted, that they would have the choice over their own reproductive health. That has been rolled back and a lot of it is because of the devaluation of women. The belief that women don't have choice and power over their own being. That's what's happening here. So you can't just turn a blind eye to it because it's not happening in your own backyard. Because eventually that kind of attitude a way of slipping and growing and feeding into all aspects of how we live as a humanity, as a human species, it affects our humanity. So we all have to care. That's what I would say.