Financial Incentives and an Adolescent Empowerment Program to Reduce Child Marriage in Rural Bangladesh
Researchers from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) on the conducted a randomised evaluation to test the impact of a conditional incentive program and an adolescent girls’ empowerment program on child marriage, dowry price, teenage childbearing, and education in Bangladesh. The team consists of Nina Buchmann Erica Field Rachel Glennerster Shahana Nazneen Xiao Yu Wang
Child marriage remains prevalent in many countries despite laws prohibiting the practice, leading to negative health and education outcomes for young women and their children. Researchers evaluated the impacts of an incentive program and an adolescent empowerment program on child marriage, teenage childbearing, and level of education in rural Bangladesh.
The researchers conducted some interventions:
First, conditional incentive programme (77 communities) where all girls aged 15-17 and unmarried at the programme start received ration cards indicating their eligibility to receive cooking oil every four months until they married or turned 18. Girls collected the oil by presenting their ration card, which was checked against a beneficiary list at oil distribution points. The value of the incentive was approximately US$16 per year. As the cooking oil must be purchased regularly by every family in Bangladesh, thus is a close substitute to cash.
Second, empowerment programme (153 communities) that invited all girls aged 10-19 to participate in a six-month cycle of their adolescent empowerment programme. The programme provided meeting places where up to twenty girls could meet five to six days a week to socialise and receive educational support and training on topics like negotiation, life skills, legal rights of women, oral communication, nutritional and reproductive health, literacy and numeracy. In half of these communities, the program also included financial literacy training.
Third, combined intervention (77 communities) where all girls who met the eligibility criteria for the two interventions received both the conditional incentive and the empowerment program.
Fourth, comparison group (153 communities) where all girls received none of the interventions.
Overall, the conditional incentives reduced child marriage and teenage childbearing and increased years of schooling, without affecting the dowry or compromising the quality of a husband. On the other hand, the empowerment program did not affect child marriage or teenage childbearing, slightly increased years of schooling, and, in fact, increased the dowry brides had to pay. These results are consistent with the following model: delaying marriage signals that a young woman does not follow traditional gender norms, which can make brides less desirable to grooms. To avoid this stigma and signal their daughters’ conformity to desired conservative norms, parents may push their daughters to marry earlier than they would otherwise.
Read the summary of the report here: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/financial-incentives-and-adolescent-empowerment-program-reduce-child-marriage-rural
