The impact and cost of child marriage prevention in three African settings.

The study took place in rural areas of Burkina Faso Ethiopia and Tanzania where child marriage was prevalent. These countries were selected to represent the range of geographies patterns of marriage and cultural practices in Africa. This study tested and costed minimum-package interventions to delay the age at marriage in three rural African settings. The study aimed to identify the most simple and minimum package needed to prevent child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa and with a potential to be scaled-up to large populations and geographical areas. We implemented different child marriage prevention strategies in different geographical areas of the study regions of the three countries. In each country one approach addressed social norms change related to child marriage through community dialogue from meetings and discussions about the practice. Another intervention provided unmarried girls aged 12 to 17 with school materials on the conditions that they remained unmarried and in school. to encourage school attendance. The third intervention was a conditional asset transfer in the form of livestock offered in another geographical area conditional on the 12-to-17-year-old girl remaining unmarried and in school. A fourth area offered all components: community meetings and discussions school supplies and an asset transfer while a fifth area served as the control area where no intervention took place. Cross-sectional baseline and endline surveys were undertaken among girls aged 12 to 17 and a smaller sample of parents before the interventions and after roughly two years of implementation. These surveys were used to measure population-level changes in child marriage and school attendance associated with the interventions using the control to measure changes that would have taken place without the interventions. In addition qualitative assessments and routine monitoring data in each country was conducted to understand contextual factors around implementation.