Too Young or Too Poor to Marry? Assessing the Impact of Brazil’s Bolsa Família Programme on Female Child Marriage

Objectives

The study aimed to estimate the effect of Brazil’s Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer programme on the probability that girls under age 18 are married. It tested the hypothesis, grounded in a simple household optimisation model, that improved household income reduces incentives for child marriage among poor families. Using 2019 PNAD Continuous survey data and propensity score matching, the authors sought to measure impacts by age group and income category, and to assess whether effects are stronger among extremely poor and poor households

Findings

The programme reduces the likelihood of female child marriage, with effects concentrated among poor girls and those aged 16–17 years. Among poor households, Bolsa Família lowers the probability that girls aged 16–17 are married by about 9–10 percentage points, and by around 3–4 percentage points when all girls aged 12–17 are pooled. The effect among the extremely poor is smaller and only clearly significant when all 12–17-year-old girls are combined, suggesting the benefit level may be insufficient to shift behaviour in the poorest families. When all Bolsa Família–eligible households are analysed together, the programme still reduces child marriage by roughly 3–6 percentage points, confirming a protective effect.

There is some evidence of a modest reduction in child marriage even among non-eligible households that receive the programme, indicating positive spillovers, although these estimates are weaker and less precise. Sensitivity analysis suggests results are generally robust to unobserved factors, but potential overestimation cannot be fully ruled out. Overall, the findings support the theoretical prediction that income support and education conditionalities help families delay girls’ marriage, especially where financial constraints drive early unions.

Recommendations

The authors recommend strengthening and preserving conditional cash transfer programmes as part of Brazil’s strategy to prevent child marriage. Policy-makers should maintain and, where possible, increase benefits for poor households with adolescent girls, and ensure that education and health conditionalities are enforced in ways that keep girls in school through later adolescence. For extremely poor households, higher or better-calibrated transfers may be needed to change marriage decisions, given their tighter budget constraints. Programme managers should improve targeting to reduce leakage to non-eligible families while recognising that even these transfers can generate positive externalities for girls’ marriage timing. The paper also calls for further research that disaggregates impacts by region and explores effects on boys, so that future cash-transfer and social protection reforms can more deliberately incorporate child-marriage prevention objectives.

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