Evidence Review of Child Marriage in South Asia

1. Evidence Review of Child Marriage in South Asia UNICEF ROSA/UNFPA APRO Joint Meeting August 21, 2019 Erin K. Fletcher, PhD with Taveeshi Gupta, PhD

2. Outline • Background and Impetus for the Study • Trends and Data • New Evidence • Measurement and Evaluation Tools • Persistent Gaps in Knowledge and Evidence • Recommendations

3. Background and Impetus for the Study • Child marriage continues to be an area of interest for researchers and international organizations • 2016 UNICEF/UNFPA Expert Group Meeting • Rapidly expanding evidence base • Renewed need to examine new findings for South Asia

4. Trends and Data • Rates of child marriage among girls are decreasing across South Asia • Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Pakistan • Data quality and availability continue to limit analysis of child marriage trends • Boys’ experiences • Sri Lanka, Afghanistan • Within-country heterogeneity is high and better documented • Some regions still showing increases in child marriage • Select islands in Maldives • Rajasthan, Maharasthra, Uttar Pradesh

5. New Evidence

6. Drivers of Child Marriage • Economic Situation and Shocks • Lack of resources sometimes correlated with child marriage • Child marriage as status symbol for higher-resourced families • Shocks & migration important and understudied contributor to child marriage (e.g., climate emergencies) • Macro-economic change impacts the reduction of child marriage if the norm is weaker • Education • Insufficient causal evidence on education • Benefits of increased literacy, education may not accrue to current generation

7. Drivers of Child Marriage: Norms • Persistent Gender Norms and Social Norms • Patriarchal views on puberty • Restriction of girls’ mobility • Strongly held perceptions of community norms may counteract information campaigns (knowledge of harmful effects may not be sufficient • Evolving Gender Norms and Social Norms • Girls’ education and aspirations • Shifting gender roles and decreasing marital age gap • Improving labour force participation rates (but risk of child labour) • “…contexts where norms are in flux are most amenable to changing child marriage practices.”

8. Linkages to Other Sectors • Sexual and Reproductive Health • Regionally, fertility rates are falling • Marital fertility is still high • Comprehensive sexual education and reproductive health services still needed to support child brides • Gender-based violence • Heterogeneity of risk of spousal violence among child brides is high • Causal linkages are not supported by evidence • Unmarried girls at high risk of GBV

9. Interventions to Prevent Child Marriage • Evidence on empowering girls (information, skills, support networks) is mixed • Largely positive, but narrow focus not sufficient to move the needle • Information and awareness building for men, families, boys & gatekeepers • Promising, but needs more work • Norms change takes time and is intensive • Income Transfers • Evidence supports increase in secondary school completion and child marriage delay • High potential for unintended consequences and merits more research • Mixed evidence as to whether income transfers contribute to ending child marriage

10. Legal and Policy Frameworks • National Action Plans and Legal Frameworks to directly or indirectly address child marriage are evolving and being put in place • Legal and policy coherence is low • Distinction between own-choice marriages and forced marriages fuzzy in most places • Enforcement remains low • Effects of laws and NAPs unclear • Is lack of efficacy related monetary resources or other barriers?

11. Measurement and Evaluation Tools • Expansion of RCTs and quasi-experimental work to understand drivers • Often address narrow questions and data sharing is low, undermining confidence • Some bright spots, but RCTs remain expensive and difficult to implement • Expansion of disaggregated data important for descriptive work to understand trends

12. Persistent Gaps in Research • Geographic focus is strongly on Nepal, Bangladesh, and India • Low data quality and availability in Maldives, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan • Child grooms • National Action Plans and associated budgets

13. Recommendations And Next Steps

14. Future Research: Systems View • Feedback Loops & Externalities • Efficacy of single-outcome programming Social and Gender Norms • Communications programming largely ineffective • How to address? Legal Reviews Context & Within-country estimates • Urbanization • Marginalized Groups “Child marriage is not [merely]…a problem of poverty that can be easily fixed…but rather a cultural and social institution that is deeply embedded in communities, norms, and cultural and religious frameworks and deserving of a careful view “ -Gupta and Fletcher, 2019

15. Questions? Thank you!