Effectiveness of interventions to reduce child marriage and teen pregnancy in sub‑Saharan Africa: A systematic review of quantitative evidence

Summary & Objectives

The study aimed to identify and synthesise quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of interventions to reduce child marriage and teen pregnancy among adolescent girls in sub-Saharan Africa. It sought to describe the types of interventions implemented, assess which approaches show consistent impact across settings and subgroups, and highlight gaps in the evidence base to guide future programming and research.

Findings

The review included 30 comparative studies, most of them cluster randomised trials, conducted in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Interventions clustered into four main categories: building educational assets, strengthening life skills and health assets, wealth-building approaches such as cash or asset transfers, and community dialogues to shift norms, often delivered in multi-component packages. Only a limited set of interventions showed consistent impact on child marriage and teen pregnancy across studies.

Provision of scholarships or school subsidies and other measures that reduce direct schooling costs reduced the likelihood of early marriage and pregnancy in several settings, particularly over longer follow-up periods. Structured and intensive community dialogues that directly addressed child marriage norms and promoted girls’ education also reduced child marriage in some contexts, especially where community mobilisation was sustained and closely monitored.

In contrast, unconditional cash transfers to ultra-poor households, safe spaces alone, and some complex multi-component packages showed mixed or no effects, and in one setting a combined intervention appeared to increase marriage among older adolescent girls. Heterogeneity in intervention content, intensity, target groups and outcome measurement limited comparability and precluded meta-analysis, and few studies reported cost-effectiveness

Recommendations

Programmes seeking to prevent child marriage and teen pregnancy in sub-Saharan Africa should prioritise interventions that directly ease financial barriers to schooling for girls and that combine this support with high-quality education or skills-building opportunities. Designers should integrate robust, context-sensitive community dialogues that confront gender norms and explicitly challenge the social acceptability of child marriage, while ensuring sufficient duration, coverage and monitoring.

Future investments should focus on rigorous impact evaluations that unpack which components of multi-faceted programmes drive change, including subgroup analyses by age, schooling and marital status. Cost-effectiveness analyses are needed to guide scale-up and ensure sustainability, and researchers should use standardised outcome definitions and reporting to improve comparability across studies and inform regional policy and programming.