Secondary Schooling Education as a Strategy to Combat Child Marriage

The evidence base on child marriage has grown substantially over the past decade, especially regarding its levels, trends, causes and consequences. The importance of such evidence is that it has been particularly useful in making an urgent case for investing in child marriage prevention initiatives and for doing so with cross-sectoral efforts. However, the rates of child marriage in the West and Central African region remain unacceptably high. An extremely effective but not yet fully explored strategy is to use girls’ education as a mechanism towards ending child marriages. By analysing the correlation between early marriage and school drop-out rates and looking at the advantages of this correlation to the regions Sustainable Development Goals, this article advocates for ending child marriages in a more targeted way. The paper will analyse some country-specific strategies to highlight how investing in girls’ education at more than primary schooling level will lead to the achievement of many of the development goals of the region. This paper aims to fill a knowledge gap by arguing that there currently exists an opportunity to address child marriages and development goals through policies and strategies that are specifically aimed at keeping girls in school for longer.