Research Spotlight: Economic empowerment interventions to address child marriage

Summary

The Research Spotlight (RS) examines the evidence that informed the World Health Organisation (WHO) strong recommendation to implement interventions to improve girls’ economic empowerment, their financial literacy, access to savings, employment skills and prospects, and to expand alternatives to marriage before age 18 as part of the comprehensive framework needed to prevent child marriage and support married girls.

In this RS we look at the evidence behind this recommendation, and the implications for policy and programmatic work and research. We also offer additional evidence, insights and practical tools to support implementation of such interventions.

In the poster, we summarise the key findings and insights to highlight what works to improve girls' economic empowerment and child marriage outcomes.

Purpose

You can use the brief and the poster to prompt further discussion and research, and to ensure your work is informed by the existing evidence.

This Research Spotlight

- Builds an evidence-informed case for girls’ economic empowerment interventions that support girls’ and adolescents’ ability to make and act on decisions around the control and allocation of resources and that reduce economic pressures on households living in poverty and provide alternatives to child marriage

o Drawing on evidence from 11 studies focused on economic empowerment interventions and their impact on child marriage prevalence: most focused on Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Liberia, Uganda and Zambia; the impact of skills-building programmes, including life skills and livelihoods training components; interventions directly focused on adolescent girls.

- Highlights three promising practice pathways to consider for inclusion in the design of effective and context sensitive girls’ economic empowerment interventions that act at the household level (to reduce financial pressures that drive child marriage) and/or work directly with girls and adolescent girls to

o Enhance their knowledge, skills and health through economic education and life skills or vocational training

o Increase their autonomy and value in the household, making work a viable option.

o Facilitate employment opportunities as an alternative to marriage.

- Suggests evidence-based strategies to improve economic empowerment & child marriage outcomes including:

o Girl-focused interventions to build girls’ skills, networks & knowledge

o Gender-transformative household & community-level interventions to address the social norms that limit opportunities for girls

o Structural-level initiatives to improve girls’ & women’s economic security, independence & equality

- And provides a list of curated and accessible practical tools to support policy and programmatic work on child marriage and girls’ economic empowerment

Audience

Practitioners, researchers, advocates, civil society organisations, investors and researchers who are working on prevention of child marriage and support to ever married girls in standalone child marriage interventions, or as part of broader gender justice, adolescent girls’ rights or women’s economic empowerment programming, policy or research.