Limitations
There are a few key limitations to note. First, we acknowledge that there was a difference in research design in India and Malawi (cluster randomized cross sectional design) versus Mali and Niger (quasi experimental matched design). As such, the lack of results in Mali and Niger may be due in part to the challenges of finding suitable comparison communities and be explained by contextual differences between those countries and India. Niger samples sizes may also be too limited to detect change; while power calculations used proportion of girls ages 15–19 married using DHS data from 2012, the proportion of girls found to be ever married at baseline was substantially lower than expected. While our focus was on measuring impact on key outcomes for girls at the community level, we acknowledge that including only adolescent girls in the sample limited our ability to make inferences about changes in community norms more broadly. Additionally, we note that child marriage is declining everywhere (Despite these limitations, we believe our results provide important information about the context-specific questions that arise in understanding the impact of community-focused asset-building programs to address child marriage. Our findings suggest that these programs can still be highly effective in contexts that share similarities with the evidence base built on programs in South Asia, including areas where parents are often involved in decisions about girls’ marriages, alternative education and livelihood options exist for girls and women, and other drivers of child marriage—such as migration or premarital sex—are less influential. The lack of demonstrated effectiveness of the MTBA intervention in Niger, Malawi and Mali suggests that programs in these contexts need to be better tailored to specific drivers of child marriage in those settings, as noted in Psaki et al 2021 [