Speaker
Description
According to UNICEF, it will take 300 years to wipe out child marriage at the current speed of progress. Child marriage remains a huge problem despite global interventions and laws being in force in most countries, leading to profound adverse consequences. More and more countries are implementing age-of-marriage laws with a minimum marriage age of at least 18. Yet, previous literature has shown that the effectiveness of these laws can be questioned as existing evidence is inconclusive. This paper uses a novel retrospective cohort approach as an identification strategy to examine this issue. Household and context factors are simultaneously accounted for in a multilevel binominal regression for women aged 13-25 based on DHS, UNICEF, Girls not Brides, and World Bank data for 39 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1992 to 2019. After controlling for age, survey year effects, and the birth-year cohort trend, results show that a new child marriage law does not affect child marriage rates, although an update of existing law does have a reinforcing effect. The reinforcing effect of a legal update is most pronounced for child marriages between 15 and 18 years of age, it cannot be identified for the younger age group of 6- to 14-year-olds.
| Keyword | Political Economy |
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