Schoolgirls Not Brides: Secondary Education as a Shield Against Child Marriage

Objectives

The paper examines whether removing financial and logistical barriers to secondary education through a three-year scholarship for rural adolescent girls in Niger can reduce school dropout and child marriage. It also aims to understand the mechanisms driving these effects, including gains in human capital, shifts in preferences and aspirations, and to test whether the programme generates positive or negative spillover effects on non-beneficiary girls in the same villages.

Findings

The scholarship halved school dropout, reducing the share of girls out of school at endline from about 40% to 19%, and cut the probability of being married at follow-up from 14% to 7%.

Among girls aged 18 and above, child marriage fell sharply, from 21% in the control group to 4% in the treatment group, with instrumental-variable estimates indicating that each additional year of middle school lowers the likelihood of being married by around 19 percentage points and of being married as a child by about 30 percentage points.

The intervention increased girls’ life satisfaction by a quarter of a standard deviation, raised their aspirations for completing high school, pursuing higher education and entering modern occupations, and shifted their preferred ages for marriage and first birth upwards; mothers’ aspirations for their daughters moved in the same direction.

The programme improved girls’ numeracy and overall academic skills but had limited effects on psychosocial skills and sexual and reproductive health knowledge, and there was no clear evidence of positive or negative externalities on other eligible or ineligible girls in the same communities.

Recommendations

The authors recommend that governments and development partners adopt and scale scholarships or similar financial support that fully cover the non-tuition costs of secondary education for vulnerable rural girls, using light conditionality based mainly on school registration and continued enrolment. They argue that child-marriage strategies in high-prevalence settings like Niger should treat secondary education financing as a core prevention tool, alongside legal reforms, by embedding such scholarships within national plans on girls’ education, women’s empowerment and demographic transition. Implementation should strengthen administrative systems for timely and predictable payments, explore digital delivery to reduce costs, and incorporate rigorous monitoring, cost-effectiveness analysis and longer-term follow-up to track sustained impacts on marriage, fertility, labour market outcomes and intergenerational aspirations.