Study Examines What’s Working to End Child Marriage Worldwide

Child marriage is a serious problem that violates girls’ human rights and undermines efforts to reduce poverty, improve health and educate girls. In the forthcoming brief, “Solutions to End Child Marriage: What the Evidence Shows,” ICRW summarizes what works and recommends ways forward.

In the forthcoming brief, “Solutions to End Child Marriage: What the Evidence Shows,” ICRW summarizes what works and recommends ways forward.

Child marriage is increasingly recognized as a serious problem: a violation of girls’ human rights and a hindrance to key development outcomes. As a growing set of program, policy, donor and advocacy constituencies pledge commitment, resources and action to address this problem, it is important to examine past efforts and how well they have worked.

Finding model solutions to address child marriage has been a challenge because, while there has been increasing investment in programs during the last decade, many are not well-documented, and even fewer are well-evaluated.

In the forthcoming brief, “Solutions to End Child Marriage: What the Evidence Shows,” ICRW summarizes a systematic review of child marriage prevention programs that have documented evaluations. Child marriage prevention programs have indeed expanded in number and scope during the last decade. The results from this composite of evaluations lean toward positive findings, indicating that a set of strategies have improved knowledge, attitudes and behavior related to child marriage prevention. Based on this synthesis of evaluated programs, we analyze the broader implications of these findings.