National and international communities are increasingly recognizing child marriage as a serious problem, both as a violation of girls’ human rights and as a hindrance to key development outcomes. As more program, policy, donor and advocacy constituencies pledge commitment, resources and action to address this problem, it becomes important to examine past efforts and how well they have worked. Finding model solutions to address child marriage has been a challenge because, while there has been increasing investment in programs during the last decade, many are not well-documented, and even fewer are well-evaluated.
In this brief, we summarize a systematic review of child marriage prevention programs that have documented evaluations. Based on this synthesis of evaluated programs, we offer an analysis of the broader implications for viable solutions to child marriage.
Our findings show that child marriage prevention programs have indeed expanded in number and scope during the last decade; almost two dozen have documented some type of an evaluation. The largest number of evaluated programs is in South Asia, especially in Bangladesh and India. Programs in a broader range of African and Middle Eastern countries, including Ethiopia and Egypt, are also adding to the evidence base. On balance, the results from this composite of evaluations lean toward positive findings, indicating that a set of strategies focusing on girls’ empowerment, community mobilization, enhanced schooling, economic incentives and policy changes have improved knowledge, attitudes, and behavior related to child marriage prevention. The strongest, most consistent results are shown in a subset of programs fostering information, skills, and networks for
girls in combination with community mobilization. While many child marriage prevention programs are only beginning to explore possibilities of going to scale, there are encouraging signs that large-scale structural efforts aimed at other goals, such as education, health, and poverty reduction, are beginning to make a connection with child marriage prevention. A smaller, but growing set of such programs is providing tentative but promising evaluation results, laying the foundation for building new partnerships and leveraging scarce resources.