A synthesis of what we know works to prevent and respond to child marriage: Evidence Paper for UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage

Objectives

The paper aims to synthesise recent global evidence on what works to prevent and respond to child marriage and to improve outcomes for adolescent girls. It seeks to classify intervention approaches by the strength and consistency of impact, highlight key implementation lessons, and identify critical gaps that should guide Phase III of the UNFPA–UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage (2024–2030).

Findings

The paper finds that the strongest and most consistent evidence for reducing child marriage comes from three areas: income and economic strengthening, education and life skills, and sexual and reproductive health and rights. Cash and in-kind transfers, especially when linked to schooling and delivered through government social protection systems, reliably delay marriage, increase school attendance and can reduce adolescent pregnancy and violence. Education interventions that keep girls in secondary school and build targeted life skills show durable effects on age at marriage and related outcomes.

Comprehensive sexuality education and adolescent-responsive SRH services help delay sexual debut and pregnancy and improve contraceptive use, especially when combined with other components. Evidence for gender and social norms interventions, systems strengthening, girl-focused safe spaces and legal and policy reform is promising but mixed; these approaches can contribute to change, particularly when embedded within multi-sectoral packages, yet many evaluations are short term, underpowered or lack clear measures of norm change and enforcement effects. The paper stresses persistent evidence gaps in humanitarian and climate-affected settings, for girls with disabilities, very young adolescents, married and divorced girls, and in high-burden countries that remain under-studied.

Recommendations

The authors recommend prioritising scale-up of proven interventions that expand girls’ access to quality secondary education, provide adequate and sustained cash or in-kind support to poor households, and ensure responsive SRH information and services for adolescents. They call for integrating gender and social norms work, girl-focused empowerment activities and system-level capacity building into these core platforms, rather than implementing them as stand-alone projects.

They emphasise the need to strengthen legal and policy frameworks on minimum age of marriage and SRHR, coupled with realistic enforcement, monitoring and protection mechanisms, so laws do not simply push child marriage into informal unions. Finally, the paper urges investment in long-term impact and implementation research, including in fragile and neglected contexts, and routine use of high-quality monitoring data to adapt programmes and build a cumulative evidence base that can guide the Global Programme in Phase III