Project report
Keeping girls in schools to reduce child marriage in rural Bangladesh—Program brief
Population Council ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001Bangladesh has improved school access but girls still drop out at secondary level, often due to child marriage. The Population Council implemented the BALIKA project to test whether combining remedial education support, life-skills training, and community mobilization could keep girls in school and delay marriage. The intervention includes tutoring for in-school girls, livelihood training for out-of-school girls, and school management strengthening in rural Bangladesh.
Key points
- Girls in Bangladesh drop out of secondary school earlier than boys primarily because of child marriage
- The BALIKA project combines remedial educational support, soft-skills livelihood training, and community mobilization
- The intervention targets both in-school girls at risk of dropout and out-of-school girls who have already left
- The project is part of UNICEF's Education for Adolescents and UNFPA-UNICEF's Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage
- School management committees and school improvement activities are being strengthened as part of the intervention
Limitations
This is a program brief describing an intervention being tested, not an evaluation report with results. It does not provide data on the effectiveness of BALIKA or outcomes for participating girls.
Abstract
For the last two decades, Bangladesh has made considerable progress in improving access to education at all levels. Despite these gains, the country continues to face challenges from 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 educational attainment and decrease child marriage may be an effective and sustainable way to address both issues. The Population Council implemented an intervention research study to test a life-skills and tutoring support model to reduce school dropout among secondary-school girls and enhance livelihood skills for unmarried girls who have dropped out of school, with the goal of delaying marriage. This project is part of UNICEF’s Education for Adolescents and UNFPA-UNICEF's Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage. As noted in this brief, the study tested the BALIKA project in intervention schools for scale-up. In the intervention schools, a blend of remedial educational support to in-school girls, soft-skills-based livelihood training for out-of-school girls, strengthening school management committees, community mobilization, and school improvement activities are being tested.