More Than Brides Alliance: Midline evaluation report

Objectives

The report aimed to assess the midline impact of the More Than Brides Alliance “Marriage: No Child’s Play” programme on delaying child marriage and improving related outcomes for adolescent girls in India, Malawi, Mali and Niger. It sought to measure changes between baseline and midline in marriage, pregnancy, education, livelihoods, SRHR knowledge and gender-equitable attitudes, comparing intervention and comparison areas to estimate programme effects.

Findings

Across all four countries the proportion of girls aged 12–19 who were ever married declined between baseline and midline, although these trends appeared in both intervention and comparison areas and could not be attributed solely to the programme. Knowledge related to child marriage and SRHR improved in most settings, with notable gains in legal age of marriage and contraceptive knowledge in several intervention areas, and some evidence that MTBA helped protect girls’ school enrolment and years of schooling in Malawi and Mali.

The programme also contributed to more gender-equitable attitudes and higher engagement in girls’ groups, although effects varied by country and state, and implementation and design issues, especially matching challenges and contamination in Malawi, limited the ability to detect clear impacts on all indicators.

Recommendations

The authors recommend strengthening implementation fidelity and comparison designs so that future analyses can more clearly attribute changes in child marriage and related outcomes to the MTBA approach. They suggest deepening work on education, livelihoods, SRHR services and norm change in combination, while maintaining strong support for girls’ groups and community structures that show promise for improving knowledge and delaying marriage. They also call for programme adaptations based on midline results, closer attention to contextual trends such as national campaigns and legal reforms, and continued follow-up to endline to understand which strategies most effectively protect girls from child marriage across diverse settings.