Evaluating the effects of an intervention against child marriage: Six year follow-up

Project Summary/Abstract An estimated 12 million adolescent girls marry before the age of 18 annually, the majority of whom live in resource-constrained environments in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Northern Nigeria is a striking example, with 78% of girls married before the age of 18, and 48% before the age of 15. Child marriage worsens not only health outcomes, including early fertility, maternal morbidity and mortality, depression, and sexually transmitted infections, but also important social determinants of health like education, social support, and intimate partner violence. The complex and contextual determinants of child marriage mean that successful interventions are rare, and causal evidence on the effects of delaying child marriage remains limited, with many programs to delay child marriage focusing on a single, limited margin of intervention. A previous cluster-randomized control trial of the Pathways intervention in northern Nigeria led to unusually large reductions in child marriage two years post intervention by combining social, educational, and vocational support with community-based recruitment. By generating a novel dataset from follow up surveys with the original study participants six years after implementation, we propose not only to evaluate the effectiveness of the Pathways program, but also to leverage this unusually successful program to generate rigorous causal evidence on the effects of delaying child marriage. We will generate causal evidence on the intervention's effectiveness on marital, health and related outcomes, and use cost-benefit analysis to translate the results to policy-relevant figures, contributing to the global knowledge base on preventing child marriage and simultaneously informing the design of future interventions.