The impact and cost of child marriage prevention in rural Burkina Faso

The negative impact of child marriage, frequently prevalent in rural locations of poor countries, spans health, development, and demographic consequences. While evidence is limited, a systematic review of child marriage interventions in developing countries found that the most effective approaches in delaying child marriage were those that empower girls by offering incentives such as conditional cash transfers. However, most impact evaluations of community-based programs lack rigorous costing data, a particular weakness of cash transfer schemes where programmatic cost would affect the ability to scale up successful interventions for large populations. To address the limited information on cost and scalability of conditional cash transfer programs, the Population Council and its partners designed a study to determine if simple, cost-contained interventions could be effective at delaying marriage in African countries where child marriage is prevalent. This brief outlines the results of the research in the Cascades Region of Burkina Faso, and includes rigorous costing data, providing evidence for subsequent expansion of successful approaches