A girl has her face painted during the 236th annual Military, Civic, and Firemen’s Parade as part of 4th of July celebrations in Bristol, Rhode Island, U.S., July 5, 2021. (Photo by Quinn Glabicki/Reuters)

A handout picture made available by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows, NASA teams working around Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft after it landed at White Sands Missile Range’s Space Harbor, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 25 May 2022. Boeing’s Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) is Starliner’s second uncrewed flight test to the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. OFT-2 serves as an end-to-end test of the system's capabilities. (Photo by Bill Ingalls/NASA/EPA/EFE)

An Afghan vendor selling birds to be kept as pets wait for customers in his shop in Kabul on December 11, 2021. (Photo by Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP Photo)

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)

Visitors look at tropical fish transported from Japan's southern island of Okinawa displayed in a giant 14-ton fish tank at the Sony Square event space in Tokyo on July 17, 2016. The 45-day-long summer exhibition will be held through August 28 to display sea creatures common to the waters around Okinawa. (Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP Photo)

A local farmer Theophilus Mwendwa runs through a swarm of desert locusts to chase them away in the bush near Enziu, Kitui County, some 200km east of the capital Nairobi, Kenya, 24 January 2020. Large swarms of desert locusts have been invading Kenya for weeks, after having infested some 70 thousand hectares of land in Somalia which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has termed the “worst situation in 25 years” in the Horn of Africa. FAO cautioned that it poses an “unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods in the region. (Photo by Dai Kurokawa/EPA/EFE)

Performer Zhang Yashu from a Chinese ballet company perform during a photo shoot in front of the Australia's iconic landmarks Opera House (L) and Habour Bridge in Sydney on February 17, 2014. One of China's celebrated dance campanies is bringing one of the country's biggest ballet production to Australia for a series of performances in Sydney and Melbourne. (Photo by Saeed Khan/AFP Photo)

In this Wednesday, September 17, 2014 photo, the sun shines over a field of sunflowers in Walkill, N.Y. (Photo by John DeSanto/AP Photo/Times Herlad-Record)