Child Marriage and Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program: Analysis of protective pathways in the Amhara region Final Report

Summary & Objectives

The study aims to understand how Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program in Amhara may influence child marriage among girls in PSNP households. It seeks to describe current patterns, drivers and decision-making dynamics of child marriage in selected woredas, and to explore the economic, education and norm-change pathways through which PSNP and its complementary components might delay marriage.

Findings

Child marriage remains common among PSNP households in Amhara, with about one in three women aged 20-24 and over two in five women aged 20-29 first married as children, although qualitative and cohort patterns suggest a gradual decline over time. Poverty, economic insecurity, concerns about family honour and girls’ sexuality, and strong social and gender norms continue to drive early marriage, while girls themselves report very limited voice and agency over marriage decisions.

The analysis indicates that PSNP can reduce some poverty-related incentives for early marriage and support girls’ schooling, and that behaviour change communication and social worker engagement are associated with more negative attitudes towards child marriage, but there is also a risk that increased household resources can enable some families to finance weddings and dowries more easily in norm-conservative settings.

Recommendations

The report recommends that PSNP and similar social protection programmes be more deliberately designed and implemented with explicit child marriage objectives, including stronger incentives and support to keep girls in school, more systematic and intensive BCC and home visits focused on risks of child marriage and early childbearing, and closer linkage to child protection, legal, health and counselling services. It calls for Ethiopia’s move toward a broader social assistance system to include programmes tailored to vulnerable adolescents, and for rigorous impact evaluations that test how large-scale social protection can best be combined with child-marriage programming and taken to scale to accelerate progress toward SDG targets on poverty reduction and elimination of child, early and forced marriage