Evaluating the Employment Benefits of Education and Targeted Interventions to Reduce Child Marriage

Summary & Objectives

The study aimed to identify effective specific child marriage and education interventions that can reduce child marriage across 31 low- and middle-income countries, and to estimate their economic benefits via improved schooling, employment and productivity. It sought to model how these interventions affect marriage rates for girls aged 15–17 years, secondary school completion, and women’s employment patterns, and then to calculate benefit–cost ratios by comparing the costs of the interventions with the gains in gross domestic product per capita

Findings

Using a modelling framework summarised in the diagram on page 3, the study shows that a package of three specific child marriage interventions (life-skills training, community mobilisation and conditional economic incentives) plus four education interventions can reduce the average child marriage rate for girls aged 15–17 years in the 31 countries from 13.2% in 2015 to 5.2% in 2050, with about half of the decline attributable to child marriage programmes and a similar share to education measures.

By 2030, the combined interventions increase the share of young women aged 20–24 who have completed secondary school by 19.3 percentage points on average, with larger gains in low-income countries, and raise productivity among this cohort by 22.7% through more years of schooling and shifts into more formal and better-paid employment, as summarised in Table 4. The benefit–cost analysis in Table 5 indicates an average benefit–cost ratio of 7.4 at a 3% discount rate across the 31 countries, with higher returns in low-income settings where baseline schooling and productivity are lowest; sensitivity analyses suggest these ratios remain well above one even under more conservative assumptions.

Recommendations

The authors recommend that governments and development partners invest in combined packages of targeted child marriage interventions and education system interventions rather than pursuing either in isolation, because keeping girls in school and changing social norms around early marriage are mutually reinforcing. They argue that priority should be given to scaling these programmes in low-income countries and high-prevalence settings where projected gains in secondary completion, formal employment and productivity are largest, and that design should draw on evidence-based models such as life-skills curricula, community mobilisation and conditional incentives for girls to remain unmarried and in school. They also call for more rigorous evaluation of programme effectiveness and costs across diverse contexts, and for policies that embed these interventions within broader efforts to improve schooling quality and address gendered social norms, so that reductions in child marriage translate into sustained economic and social benefits over the life course.