What Are the Drivers of Child Marriage? A Conceptual Framework to Guide Policies and Programs
Objectives
The paper aims to develop a simplified conceptual framework that explains the core drivers of child marriage for girls and links these drivers to policy and program design across settings. It also seeks to illustrate how these drivers interact in practice using qualitative case studies from Bangladesh, Malawi and Niger, so that decision-makers can better match interventions to context.
Findings
The study identifies five interrelated drivers of child marriage: poverty and economic factors, lack of opportunity, social norms and attitudes, lack of agency, and fear of girls’ sexuality and pregnancy. Social norms and poverty are presented as underlying conditions that shape girls’ agency and opportunities and influence how communities respond to adolescent sexuality. Case studies show that the relative importance and interaction of these drivers vary across contexts, for example, strong arranged-marriage norms in rural Bangladesh, economic dependence and peer-cohort marriage in Niger, and pregnancy-triggered marriage in southern Malawi, implying that effective interventions must be tailored to the dominant local drivers rather than relying on a single model.
Summary
The paper presents a concise conceptual framework that explains how poverty, limited opportunities, restrictive social norms, constrained agency and concerns about sexuality interact to drive child marriage. Drawing on qualitative data from Bangladesh, Malawi and Niger, it shows how these drivers combine in different ways across settings and shape families’ decisions about when and whom girls marry. The authors argue that dominant narratives that blame a single factor, such as poverty or tradition, overlook this complexity and can lead to poorly targeted interventions.
Purpose
The purpose of the paper is to give policymakers, practitioners and researchers a simple but robust framework to diagnose the main drivers of child marriage in a given context and to design more tailored, effective responses. By linking the framework to real-world examples, the authors aim to support programmes that are better aligned with local realities and that more effectively delay marriage and improve outcomes for girls.
Audience
The target audience includes policymakers, programme designers, practitioners and donors working on child marriage prevention and adolescent girls’ empowerment. It is also intended for researchers seeking clearer guidance on how contextual drivers shape intervention design and for organisations developing national strategies or adapting programmes across diverse settings.
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