Project report
Keeping girls in schools to reduce child marriage in rural Bangladesh
Ainul, Sigma, Talukder, Md. Noorunnabi, Hossain, Md. Irfan, Noor, Forhana Rahman, Ehsan, Iqbal et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This project from the Population Council in Bangladesh tests an intervention combining life-skills training and tutoring to keep secondary-school girls in school and delay marriage. The project addresses two interconnected problems: high dropout rates among girls driven by child marriage, and limited livelihood aspirations among girls who have already left school. The intervention targets unmarried girls in rural areas with the goal of improving educational attainment while reducing early marriage.
Key points
- Girls in Bangladesh drop out of secondary school earlier than boys, primarily because of child marriage
- The intervention combines life-skills and tutoring support for in-school girls and those who have already dropped out
- The project aims to build livelihood aspirations among girls to delay marriage
- Bangladesh has improved educational access over two decades but continues to face secondary-level dropout challenges
Limitations
The document is a project overview and brief that does not provide detailed findings, outcome data, or conclusions about the intervention's effectiveness. It cannot tell us whether the life-skills and tutoring model actually reduced dropout rates or delayed marriage.
Abstract
Bangladesh has made considerable progress in improving access to education at all levels for the last two decades. Despite these impressive gains, Bangladesh continues to face challenges of student dropout at the secondary level. Girls drop out of school earlier than boys because of child marriage. Targeted policies and interventions designed to improve mainstream educational attainment and decrease child marriage may be the effective and sustainable way to address both issues. The Population Council implemented the project “Keeping Girls in Schools to Reduce Child Marriage in Rural Bangladesh.” An intervention research study, the project tests a life-skills and tutoring support model to reduce school drop-out among secondary-school girls and to build aspirations for livelihood skills among unmarried girls who have dropped out of school—with the goal of delaying marriage. This brief provides an overview and summary of the project followed by highlights: research design and baseline characteristics, education, marriage and reproductive health, gender and rights, girls’ social lives, and livelihood.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Life-skills and tutoring support model for secondary-school girls and unmarried girls who have dropped out of school
- Population
- Secondary-school girls and unmarried girls who have dropped out of school in rural Bangladesh
Key finding
Project tested life-skills and tutoring support model to reduce school dropout and delay marriage