Accelerating action to end child marriage in Bangladesh—Project brief

Bangladesh has one of the world's highest rates of child marriage. The Population Council and Ministry of Women and Children Affairs are partnering to test approaches to delay marriage through an adolescent skills-building program. The program combines life-skills and livelihood training for girls with gender-awareness education and community engagement targeting the norms that support child marriage. The effectiveness of different intervention approaches is being evaluated using a randomized controlled study across 96 villages.

Key points

• Community norms and values are identified as underlying factors supporting child marriage in Bangladesh
• The intervention includes life-skills, livelihood, and gender-awareness training for adolescent girls
• Community engagement with both women and men is included to address normative drivers of child marriage
• The study uses a four-arm cluster randomized control design with 72 intervention villages across three arms and 24 control villages
• The design is intended to assess the impact of skills training alone and the added contribution of community engagement

Limitations

This is a project brief that describes the design and planned implementation but does not report outcomes or findings from the evaluation. We cannot determine what results the intervention achieved or whether it was effective in reducing child marriage.