Shreya Ghosh grew up in a household where the dinner table conversation was never really separate from the world outside. Both her parents work in the development sector. Privilege was acknowledged early, and so was the question of what to do with it. By the time she was old enough to choose a career, the choice had already been quietly forming around her for years.
Today, she serves as Head of Asia Engagement at Girls Not Brides, the global network for the movement to end child marriage, working with grassroots organisations, governments, and donors across the region to collectively address one of the world’s most persistent rights violations. But the path here, she is quick to say, was never a straight line.
A Different Kind of Upbringing
Shreya credits her parents with giving her something rarer than direction: openness. “It was never really a forced choice from my parents’ side because they were in the sector,” she says. “My sister and I were always encouraged to explore our interests .”
She briefly considered architecture and design, drawn to what those fields could mean for people with disabilities. Her father is a person with disabilities and she had grown up with what she describes as the practice of making reasonable accommodations in everyday life. The idea of designing spaces that genuinely worked for everyone appealed to her. It did not last long. “That was a big revelation when I spoke to professionals ,” she says, referring to the moment she discovered that architecture required mathematics and physics, two subjects she had no footing in.
What finally settled things was interning during her undergraduate years at Ferguson College in Pune, where she studied psychology. Those placements made something click. The work gave her satisfaction in a way she could trace and name. She went on to pursue a Master’s in Social Work, specialising in child and youth development, while also voraciously reading and learning from her peers specialising in Women’s-centered social work .
Why Children, Why Gender
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Shreya explains that the two tracks of her master’s programme, children’s rights and women’s studies, were never really separate for her. She treated them as interconnected from the start.
“If you want to make change, it is best to start as early as possible with people when opinions are being formed, when there’s space to question,” she says. Feminist she, she believed, belonged inside the work on children’s rights, not alongside it. Gender has never been a separate chapter in her career. It has run through all of it because both work to challenge power and status quo in their own ways.
Her curiosity about feminism did not begin in a classroom. It began with small things noticed at home. One of the earliest was noticing that her mother’s name and signature had changed after marriage. As a child fascinated by signatures, she noticed the difference and asked about it. Her mother explained that she had chosen to change her surname, but that it did not have to be the case for us t. “It was these small injections that you get,” Shreya says, “which then add up as you grow up.”
This was also a time when feminism carried a stigma that has not entirely disappeared. The counter-narrative, that to be a feminist is to be anti-men, anti-culture was present then and remains present now. Shreya acknowledges it plainly. What has changed, she says, is not the attitude so much as the visibility of the conversation around it, driven largely by how information moves today compared to when she was studying.
The Moment That Stayed
Her parents often took Shreya and her sister along to meet the communities they worked with during school breaks. It was on one such trip, to a community in Rajasthan, one state among many where such attitudes are far from uncommon, that a moment lodged itself in her memory and never quite left.
She was a teenager . They had entered a community meeting when people around them began telling her parents, almost casually, that they were still young enough to try for a boy. Shreya found herself turning something over in her mind. She recalls the attitude being, not spoken in those words exactly, but present in the room nonetheless.
It was not a conversation about child marriage. It was something more fundamental: the dispensability of girls in the eyes of many communities she had visited. That observation, she says, is what pushed her specifically toward girls’ rights and adolescent girls and it is a thread she has carried into every role since.
Child Marriage as a Convergence of Everything
After her master’s, Shreya worked with the Commission for Child Rights in the Right to Education division and later spent considerable time at CRY (Child Rights & You), where child marriage was one of several focus areas. Across these experiences, working on education, health, poverty, and gender, a pattern became clear to her.
Each issue, she realised, did not sit in isolation. A girl out of school was also a girl more vulnerable to early marriage. A family living in poverty weighed options differently. A community with poor access to health services faced compounding risks. All of it fed into the same outcome.
“Child marriage is essentially a blend of a failure of all of these issues,” she says in conversation with The Logical Indian. “It’s because the education system is not working, because there is poverty, because there are challenges to accessing health services, and all these are far more pronounced for people belonging to marginalised communities or gender identities. All of this comes together and it manifests in the form of child marriage, along with a very huge role played by social and gender norms.”
What Girls Not Brides Actually Does
Girls Not Brides is the network to a global movement to end child marriage, working through coalitions of grassroots organisations, whether women-led, youth-led, or community-based, each bringing its own thematic and technical expertise. The vision of the organisation is a world without child marriage, where girls in all their diversity decide if, when, and whom to marry, and where their rights and futures are fully realised. It is also a hub of research, evidence and learning on child marriage.
“We connect, we convene, we coordinate a lot of the work across the child marriage ecosystem,” she explains. In her role as Head of Asia Engagement, Shreya provides strategic oversight to the work with coalitions across the region, supporting them as they pursue shared goals and collective action.
The work is concrete. In Rajasthan, the organisation is currently building the leadership skills of young people so they can engage directly with the government and present their own ideas about what solutions should look like. In Nepal the coalition is working closely with the government and stattutory bodies to create the enabling policy environment and ensure strong monitoring mechanisms are in place to end child marriage. In Bangladesh, a project highlighted voices and aspirations of adolescent girls, before designing any systems around them.
Not Just a Cultural Problem
Child marriage is often reduced to a cultural problem, something people associate with specific states or communities. Shreya pushes back on it firmly, while acknowledging what is true in it.
“It is definitely not just a cultural issue,” she says. Social and gender norms do sustain the practice, she accepts that. But they do not explain why it persists so broadly, or why it falls so unevenly across caste and class lines.
“You will see the practice of child marriage more prominently in communities that are marginalised – Caste, poverty, disability status, geography: all of these shape who is most at risk and their access to quality and affordable basic services is limited. Child Marriage will continue to persist until we address structural inequalities. Disasters make things sharper still. When material stability breaks down, inequalities that already exist tend to deepen.
The solutions, therefore, cannot be singular either. “We cannot claim that having strong laws alone will end child marriage, investing in supportive policies and programmes on health, education, economic opportunities, gender-based violence all need to align. She brings it back to the simplest level: “At the end of the day, you’re looking at one human being. And that one human requires all opportunities to grow and realise their potential free from discrimination and stereotypes..”
The Girls Who Get Left Out
When asked what outsiders tend to miss about the reality of child marriage, Shreya points to something that rarely gets space in public discourse: how little room girls actually have to make decisions within their households.
“The scope for decision making is much smaller than what most people imagine it to be,” she says. Decisions are frequently not considered theirs to make, whether because of their gender or because they are regarded as too young. When girls do attempt to exercise agency, the results are unpredictable and not always safe.
There is also a group that she feels the broader conversation consistently fails: girls who are already married. Prevention dominates the discourse. But a girl who has already been married, she argues, should not be written off and has the right to receive opportunities to renegotiate her life trajectory. She should be supported to learn about her choices and exercise them with the required support. That could mean support to annul her marriage, where legal. But this option is often not encouraged due to social stigma and complex legal processes. Adolescent health programs need to actively include married girls. Education re-entry pathways need to be intentionally designed for them. Support systems within families and communities need to exist. “Her life should not be determined by something that she did not have control over.”
Staying in It for the Long Haul
“Years of this work affect you”, Shreya says, but not always in one direction. Sometimes it drains completely. Other times it grounds you in a way that no amount of reading or theorising can replicate. Meeting people who are actually living the issues you are fighting for, she says, pulls you out of intellectualising them. She acknowledges that as she has stepped into leadership roles, the opportunities for direct interactions with civil society and young people has reduced. Respecting knowledge of those working directly with communities and finding ways to complement that with her own growing technical and strategic expertise becomes paramount.
But staying connected to those people also means being careful about how you represent them. “If you are speaking on their behalf, it becomes like a Chinese whisper where the issue morphs in ways where it loses the core essence of it,” she says. Collaboration with those most affected is not just a method. It is what keeps the work from losing its way.
She has also learned, over time, to be deliberate about stepping back. “As you grow in the sector, you learn that if you want to do this for the long haul, every now and then, you need to intentionally distance yourself from it.” Rest, she says, is not a retreat. It is what makes returning possible.
What Comes Next
Girls Not Brides recently announced its new five-year strategy. It is bold, ambitious and has a stronger focus on working across the entire ecosystem to end child marriage. .
At its core, the strategy reflects the same belief that drew her to the organisation in the first place: that no single actor can solve a problem this complex. “When I was young, and full of radical ideas, I thought I could change the world,” she says, “and as you grow , you realise that you are a drop in the ocean and you need many other people to go along with you .” I am lucky to have had strong mentors over the years, incidentally all women, whom she continues to hold in high regard. And has a deep sense of gratitude to colleagues who have constantly challenged her and family that has supported her.
The next five years, she explains, will be about bringing the right people into the same room. This includes government representatives and decision-makers, and combining expertise across researchers, civil society organisations, survivors and youth advocactes and funders. Long-term and flexible funding is not incidental to this. It is the condition without which real change cannot happen.
The girl on that field visit in Rajasthan, sitting in a room where she was told her existence mattered less, has spent the years since proving something different. Not loudly, but steadily, and with a great many other people alongside her.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Child marriage persists not because communities do not care about their girls, but because the systems meant to protect them have repeatedly fallen short. Investing in education, health, and economic opportunity for girls is not charity. It is the bare minimum a society owes its youngest members.
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