Abstract
Abstract
Child marriage is a harmful practice and child rights violation that disproportionately affects girls, with negative impacts on their health, education, and opportunities in life. While child marriage is common in both development and humanitarian contexts, financial stress, or heightened insecurity for girls from violence suggest that the practice is more prevalent fragile settings. Using georeferenced data on armed conflict and population-level microdata for marriages of more than 2 million women across 56 countries, we estimate the impact of the occurrence and severity of conflict events in or before the year of marriage on the incidence of child marriage. Our results show that the incidence of marriage before age 18 for women in clusters located within a conflict zone in or the five years prior to the year of marriage was between 4.5 percentage points and 16.4 percentage points higher than for girls not affected by conflict, with risk increasing with severity of conflicts.
JEL Codes: J12; J16; O12
Publisher
Research Square Platform LLC
Reference17 articles.
1. Chort, I., & Hotte, R. (2022). and Karine Marazyan. ‘Income Shocks, Bride Price and Child Marriage in Turkey’. IZA Discussion Paper Series 15288. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4114873.
2. Age of Marriage, Weather Shocks, and the Direction of Marriage Payments;Corno L;Econometrica,2020
3. DHS Program (2023). ‘Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program’. 2023. https://www.dhsprogram.com/.
4. Girls Not Brides (2020).‘Child Marriage in Humanitarian Contexts’.
5. Högbladh, S. (2021). ‘UCDP GED Codebook Version 21.1’. Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University. https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/replication_data/2021_ucdp-ged-211.pdf.