Mapping the Field of Child Marriage: Evidence, Gaps, and Future Directions From a Large-Scale Systematic Scoping Review, 2000-2019

Objectives

The paper aimed to map the global evidence base on child marriage over the period 2000–2019. It sought to describe how research on child marriage has evolved over time, across regions and languages, and across key domains such as prevalence, causes, consequences, prevention and support for those married as children. It also aimed to identify gaps and future directions for research in this field.

Findings

The review identified 1,068 publications on child marriage from an initial 4,081 abstracts screened, most of which were published after 2010, with a sharp increase between 2015 and 2019. Studies were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with far fewer from Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, and high-income countries. Research was dominated by work on causes and determinants, consequences, and prevalence and trends, while far fewer studies examined interventions to prevent child marriage or efforts to support individuals married as children.

High-prevalence countries such as the Central African Republic, Chad, South Sudan, Guinea, Somalia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mauritania had very limited research despite substantial burden. Including French, Spanish and Portuguese sources revealed important evidence from Latin America, Europe, and Francophone and Lusophone Africa that is often missed in English-only reviews. Overall, the evidence base has grown rapidly but remains uneven by geography, language and research domain, with a persistent bias toward diagnosing the problem rather than evaluating responses.

Recommendations

The authors recommend a deliberate shift in research priorities from describing the prevalence, drivers and consequences of child marriage toward rigorous evaluation of interventions that prevent child marriage and support those married as children, including implementation, cost and impact. They call for greater multilingual knowledge exchange to ensure that research in French, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages contributes fully to global understanding and practice. They also urge increased investment in research in high-prevalence but under-studied countries, particularly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and fragile settings, so that programming and policy are informed by context-specific evidence rather than extrapolated from a small set of better-studied countries.