Trendlines in proportion of women ages 20–24 married by exact age 18, DHS 1988–2019.
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Bold, dotted lines show trendlines for each country. Light-shaded lines show available data, with earliest and latest datapoints represented for each country.It is additionally important to note that even if countries experienced a similar rate of decline in the proportion of girls married as children, population size has a strong impact for determining a given country’s contribution to declines in child marriage worldwide. Much of the overall decline in child marriage is explained by a substantial drop in the rates of child marriage in a few large countries with high burdens of child marriage (i.e., a high absolute number of child brides), notably in India, which is home to one in three girls married before age 18 [A series of systematic reviews [This paper examines impact evaluation data from the More than Brides Alliance (MTBA) intervention in different contexts in India, Malawi, Mali, and Niger. We examine trends in marriage prevalence among girls ages 12–19 at the community level across settings characterized by either a high burden of child marriages (India) or a high proportion of child marriage (Malawi, Mali, Niger), and distinct drivers of the practice. According to the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), the proportion of women ages 20–24 married before age 18 was approximately 76% in Niger (2012 DHS), 54% in Mali (2018 DHS), 42% in Malawi (2015–16 DHS), and 22% in India (2019–21 DHS).We additionally examine program impact on other key outcomes for adolescent girls—including school enrollment, educational attainment, working experience, and knowledge about child marriage and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)—and consider what these results suggest about pathways to child marriage in the different program settings. This paper adds to the evidence base on whether strategies informed largely by evidence from the South Asian context translate to other contexts where child marriage is prevalent, including in West and Southeastern Africa.