Balinese girls in traditional costumes gather during a parade for this year's last sundown in Bali island, Indonesia Thursday, December 31, 2015. (Photo by Firdia Lisnawati/AP Photo)

A girl in a swimsuit participates in the BoogelWoogel alpine carnival at the Rosa Khutor Alpine Resort in Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi, Russia on March 31, 2018. (Photo by Artur Lebedev/TASS)

A girl with white powder on her face celebrates the Songkran holiday which marks the Thai New Year in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 14, 2024. (Photo by Chalinee Thirasupa/Reuters)

A girl plays a jump rope game at a school housing residents displaced by gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, May 15, 2024. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

A little girl rubs her tired eyes during the first day at the lyceum named after Moldovan writer Gheorghe Asachi in Chisinau on September 2, 2024. (Photo by Dumitru Doru/Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

As part of FLAIR Melbourne – a Flinders Lane art festival – Melbourne’s Lisa Minogue presents stylised photographic portraits of Australian women of colour, their faces painted vibrantly to accentuate their individuality and encourage the viewer to study each face more closely. Minogue asked each woman the same question: “What do the words “coloured girl” mean to you?”. (Photo by Lisa Minogue/The Guardian)

5-year-old Chinese girl Wang Anna prepares meals for her grandmother and great-grandmother at home in Zhuyuan village, Guizhou province, China on March 3, 2017. Chinese girl called Wang Anna, 5, takes care of her ill grandmother and 92-year-old great-grandmother on her own every day in a mountainous village in Zhima town, Zunyi city, southwest China's Guizhou province. Her father went to jail before she was born and her mother remarried after gave birth to her. Although she is just five years old, she started to shoulder the responsibility to look after ill grandmother and elderly great-grandmother. (Photo by Imaginechina/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

As the world marks the International Day of the Girl Child, women's rights activists point to progress on a wide array of issues but say more needs to be done to protect girls from child marriage, sexual assault and other forms of exploitation. Here is a selection of pictures showing the daily lives of girls across the globe, all taken by female Associated Press photojournalists. Here: In this December 14, 2015, file photo, a young clown rides in the back of a car following a procession to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Hundreds belonging to various clown associations made their annual pilgrimage to the Basilica to pay their respects to the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's patron saint. (Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo)