Project Summary/Abstract
An estimated 12 million adolescent girls marry before the age of 18 annually, the majority of whom live in
resource-constrained environments in low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Northern Nigeria is a striking
example, with 78% of girls married before the age of 18, and 48% before the age of 15. Child marriage
worsens not only health outcomes, including early fertility, maternal morbidity and mortality, depression, and
sexually transmitted infections, but also important social determinants of health like education, social support,
and intimate partner violence. The complex and contextual determinants of child marriage mean that
successful interventions are rare, and causal evidence on the effects of delaying child marriage remains
limited, with many programs to delay child marriage focusing on a single, limited margin of intervention. A
previous cluster-randomized control trial of the Pathways intervention in northern Nigeria led to unusually large
reductions in child marriage two years post intervention by combining social, educational, and vocational
support with community-based recruitment. By generating a novel dataset from follow up surveys with the
original study participants six years after implementation, we propose not only to evaluate the effectiveness of
the Pathways program, but also to leverage this unusually successful program to generate rigorous causal
evidence on the effects of delaying child marriage. We will generate causal evidence on the intervention's
effectiveness on marital, health and related outcomes, and use cost-benefit analysis to translate the results to
policy-relevant figures, contributing to the global knowledge base on preventing child marriage and
simultaneously informing the design of future interventions.