Evaluation report
Midline report: Accelerating action to end child marriage in Bangladesh
Masuma Billah, Eashita Haque, Surojit Kundu, Md. Saddam Hossain, Momoe Makino et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This midline report evaluates a program in Bangladesh designed to end child marriage by empowering adolescent girls and engaging communities to shift social norms. The program combines skills development for girls with community engagement strategies and is being tested using a cluster randomized trial across two districts. The report presents results from approximately 11 months of intervention, measuring impacts on child marriage prevalence and related outcomes. The work builds on previous research to determine whether adding a social norms component to girl-focused programs increases effectiveness.
Key points
- The program combines skills-development opportunities for adolescent girls with alternative means of community engagement
- It is being assessed through a multi-arm cluster randomized trial design
- The intervention tests whether adding a social norms component to skills programs provides additional benefits for ending child marriage
- The midline data was collected at approximately 11 months of intervention
- The program aims to identify effective and scalable approaches that can be sustained at scale
Limitations
As a midline report, this document does not provide final outcomes or long-term follow-up data. The report does not specify detailed findings on child marriage prevalence or other key indicators in the text provided.
Abstract
This report describes results from the midline survey of Accelerating Action to End Child Marriage in Bangladesh. The objective of the program is to identify effective and scalable approaches to end child marriage by empowering girls and communities. To bring about social norms change, the program experiments with alternative means of community engagement that can be offered in conjunction with skills-development opportunities for adolescent girls. The program is being assessed in a multi-arm cluster randomized trial. This report explores the impact on the prevalence of child marriage in two districts of Bangladesh as well as on a range of other indicators at the end of approximately 11 months of intervention. The program builds on Bangladesh’s BALIKA study to test whether an additional social norms component added to the skills-development program, aimed at addressing community-level norms about females (and particularly adolescents), can offer additional benefits for ending child marriage in the communities. The program also aims to answer important questions about sustainable scale-up of girl programs.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Multi-component program combining skills development for adolescent girls with community engagement strategies to change social norms about females and adolescents
- Population
- Adolescent girls and communities in two districts of Bangladesh
Key finding
Midline assessment conducted at approximately 11 months of intervention implementation