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Child marriage and subsequent early first birth is a considerable social, economic and health concern, and a pervasive practice in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This study explores barriers and facilitators to family planning among women and girls, and their marital decision-makers subsequent to receipt of child marriage prevention programmes in Ethiopia and India. In-depth interviews with 128 women and girls who were married as minors or who cancelled or postponed marriage as minors and their marital decision-makers were analysed using content analysis. Respondents identified social norms, including child marriage and pressure to have children, and lack of information as barriers to family planning. Benefits included delayed first birth and increased birth spacing, improved maternal and child health and girls' educational attainment. Respondents associated family planning use with delayed pregnancy and increased educational attainment, particularly in Ethiopia. Child marriage prevention programmes were identified as important sources of family planning information. Ethiopia's school-based programme strengthened access to health workers and contraception more so than India's community-based programme. Findings highlight young wives' vulnerability with regard to reproductive control, and support the need for multi-sector approaches across communities, schools and community health workers to improve family planning among young wives.

Thesauri have been proven means to identify documents in libraries for centuries. In this paper, we show how this approach can be combined with most recent Internet technologies. The Java-based general thesaurus browser GenThes is able to handle several heterogeneous, multilingual thesauri. With the General European Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET), GenThes is currently being used with several environmental catalogue systems. Feedback from users reveal that this approach greatly facilitates search and retrieval as compared to free-text only search. Performance which is crucial in Web applications as well has been improved by reducing the transfer volume of data and code. The software architecture of GenThes supports easy configuration and adaption to the individual needs of different systems that it is connected to. Ongoing work as well addresses to use GenThes as a query expansion module for multilingual search in distributed document collections.