Child Marriage Facts and Figures

* Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Child Marriage Facts and Figures from the International Center for Research on Women

 

 

Child Marriage Around the world

• If present trends continue, 100 million girls will marry over the next decade. That’s 25,000 girls married every day for the next 10 years.

Poverty and Child Marriage

• Girls living in poor households are almost twice as likely to marry before 18 than girls in higher income households.
• More than half of the girls in Bangladesh, Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before age 18. In these same countries, more than 75 percent of people live on less than $2 a day.

Education and Child Marriage

• Girls with higher levels of schooling are less likely to marry as children. In Mozambique, some 60 percent of girls with no education are married by 18, compared to 10 percent of girls with secondary schooling and less than one percent of girls with higher education.
• Educating adolescent girls has been a critical factor in increasing the age of marriage in a number of developing countries, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand.

Health and Child Marriage

• Girls younger than 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s. Pregnancy is the leading cause of death worldwide for women ages 15 to 19.
• Child brides face a higher risk of contracting HIV because they often marry an older man with more sexual experience. Girls ages 15 – 19 are 2 to 6 times more likely to contract HIV than boys of the same age in sub-Saharan Africa.

Violence and Child Marriage

• Girls who marry before 18 are more likely to experience domestic violence than their peers who marry later. A study conducted by ICRW in two states in India found that girls who were married before 18 were twice as likely to report being beaten, slapped or threatened by their husbands than girls who married later.
• Child brides often show signs symptomatic of sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress such as feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and severe depression.

Religion and Child Marriage 

• No one religious affiliation was associated with child marriage, according to a 2007 ICRW study. Rather, a variety of religions are associated with child marriage in countries throughout the world.

             Child Marriage Hot Spots

Rank	Country Name	% girls married before 18
1	Niger	74.5
2	Chad	71.5
3	Mali	70.6
4	Bangladesh	66.2
5	Guinea	63.1
6	Central African Republic	57
7	Mozambique	55.9
8	Burkina Faso	51.9
9	Nepal	51.4
10	Ethiopia	49.2
11	Malawi	48.9
12	Madagascar	48.2
13	Sierra Leone	47.9
14	Cameroon	47.2
15	Eritrea	47
16	Uganda	46.3
17	India	44.5
18	Nicaragua	43.3
19	Zambia	41.6
20	Tanzania	41.1
ICRW (2010). Analysis of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data. Most recent surveys for all DHS surveyed countries. Rankings are based on data in which women ages 20 – 24 reported being married by age 18.   Read the original ICRWW report and more about child marriage here