What Works to Tackle Early Child Marriage & Empower Rural Women and Girls?: March 12th

This session, on March 12th, was divided into two parts: understanding the prevalence of forced childhood marriage & learning about interventions that have been tested. In this blog post, I will focus on the latter of the two.

First, I learned that vocabulary matters with this topic. Around the world, the word "young" is disputed--when is a child too "young" to get married? For the purposes of eradicating forced childhood marriage, the word "forced" replaces the word "young."

The following research study was presented as an intervention to forced childhood marriage:

• 460 communities were studied (2007-2010)
• 40,000 girls were involved 
• 4 Groups for the study, based on a lottery 
• Girls empowerment program
• Conditional Incentives (Cooking oil each month for delaying marriage)
• Empowerment Program + Incentives
• Received Nothing 
• This study was conducted to see whether an empowerment program or incentives were more influential in keeping young girls out of forced early marriages. 

When the cooking oil was offered as a reward for keeping out of a young marriage, the number of marriages decreased by 21%. I was shocked by this number! Although the empowerment programs did not have quite the effect of the incentives, follow-up research showed that the girls who did the empowerment program were 50% more likely to be making income by the age of 23. This research shows that incentives, based on community needs, can be really powerful in protecting women on several platforms.