Keeping girls in schools to reduce child marriage in rural Bangladesh: Endline assessment
Summary & Objectives
The study aims to evaluate whether a targeted, school-based safe-space programme for underperforming and out-of-school adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh can improve school retention and learning and reduce child marriage. It also seeks to assess wider community-level effects on girls’ schooling, SRHR, livelihoods, safety, and gender norms, and to examine how feasible it is to scale and integrate this model into the existing secondary school system
Findings
The programme protected girls against worsening conditions during COVID-19: child marriage and school dropout due to marriage rose in control areas but stayed stable in intervention areas, and girls in the programme experienced less learning loss. It increased girls’ school participation, improved some SRHR outcomes (e.g. FP knowledge, contraceptive use before first pregnancy, facility delivery), and enhanced mobility, though shifts in gender attitudes were limited.
Recommendations
The study supports scaling school-based safe-space programmes like this as a protective investment against child marriage and learning loss, especially in crises. It highlights the importance of locally recruited mentors, basic access to phones/technology, and training to sustain remote delivery, and recommends strengthening components that more explicitly target gender norms while retaining the core focus on building girls’ cognitive, social and economic assets.
Members involved
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