Sanjida Islam Choya (Bengali: সানজিদা ইসলাম ছোঁয়া) is a Bangladeshi girls’ rights activist leading advocacy against child marriage. She is the founder and leader of Grasshopper organization – an all-girls group of seven teenagers fighting child marriage. She is a member of Shuvosangho Bashundhara Group – a social welfare organization.  Choya was named in the 2022 list of BBC's 100 influential women in the world for her campaign against child marriage.^[1][2]

Activism

Choya was born in Achargaon Union in Mymensingh District and studied at Gurudayal Government College.^[3] Choya advocacy against child marriage was inspired by the plights of her own mother who was given out in early marriage and a presentation on the effects of child marriage made in her school. After the presentation, Choya who was about 13 years old at the time started her activism against child marriage.^[4] Later, her friends, between 13 and 14 years of age, teachers and a number of local teenagers in Nandail, in the Mymensingh district of Bangladesh joined in the campaign and a group known as Ghashforing (Grasshopper) was formed.^[1] The group gathers information about planned child marriages and reports to the police to stop the marriage.^[5]

In a 2018 BBC's Media Action's radio programme Hello Check! the group narrated how they saved a senior student in their school from child marriage. The parents of the senior student had arranged a marriage for their daughter due to lack of finance to fund her education. When the group learned about the marriage, Choya led her group to the girl's house pretending to be an advance team of the groom and gained access to the bride who told them that the marriage had been arranged against her will.^[6] The group then convinced the bride's parents to abort the marriage and contacted their school management to waive school fees for the girl so she could continue her education. As of 2019, the group reported stopping about 50 child marriages.^[1]

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