Impacts of Multisectoral Cash Plus Programs on Marriage and Fertility After 4 Years in Pastoralist Kenya: A Randomized Trial
Summary & Objectives
The study aimed to assess whether a 2-year multisectoral “cash-plus” programme for adolescent girls in pastoralist Wajir, Kenya—combining community gender-norm dialogues, conditional cash transfers for schooling, girls’ groups with health and life-skills, and financial literacy—could, four years after baseline, reduce early marriage, pregnancy and childbearing, and improve education, health and economic outcomes compared with violence-prevention alone
Findings
Across all girls, unadjusted analyses showed small, non-significant reductions in marriage and fertility, but adjusted models (including baseline schooling) indicated a modest overall reduction in early marriage (about 4 percentage points, roughly one-third lower than comparison). The largest and most consistent effects were among girls who were out of school at baseline: the pooled “education” arms reduced marriage by 18 percentage points (34%) and pregnancy by 15.6 percentage points (43%) relative to violence-only, with sizeable gains in education and some improvements in financial outcomes; effects on violence and health/SRH indices were limited.
Recommendations
The authors recommend multisectoral, education-linked cash-plus programmes as a promising approach to delay early marriage and fertility in highly impoverished, socially conservative settings, especially when initiated in early adolescence and explicitly supporting girls’ schooling. They suggest prioritising educational components for both in-school and out-of-school girls (without exclusively targeting the latter), continuing to refine how SRH content is delivered in restrictive norm environments, and further testing scalable models that can sustain schooling gains and marriage delays beyond the life of the programme.
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