A push to end child marriage globally is slowing, with political, social and economic instability threatening hard-won gains for young women over the past three decades.
Efforts to keep girls in school and other actions to reduce child marriage are being disrupted by economic shocks , cutbacks in global humanitarian assistance , retrenchment in women’s rights and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to researchers and experts in international development.
Given the challenges, some governments and advocates are changing tactics. Sierra Leone, which had one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage, made attending or even being the DJ at the wedding of a child a punishable crime.
“We’re at this pivotal moment where we could either continue to make progress or go backwards,” said Rachel Vogelstein , a professor and director of the Institute of Global Politics Women’s Initiative at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. She is co-author of a new report on the economic costs of child marriage.
Child marriage refers to any formal marriage or informal union between a child under age 18 and an adult or another child. The United Nations considers it a human-rights violation.
Owing to the risks of adolescent pregnancies and motherhood, the practice is linked to up to 190,000 deaths of children under age 5 annually, as well as 14,000 maternal deaths a year, according to the Columbia report. It costs the global economy $175 billion annually in lost productivity and health risks such as deaths of young mothers and children, the Columbia report said.
“Finance ministers need to know they are leaving GDP growth on the table,” said Sheryl Sandberg , the former chief operating officer of Meta Platforms, who is an advocate and donor committed to ending child marriage. The Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation funded the report.
For decades, governments have sought to reduce child marriage by banning the practice, while humanitarian groups mounted efforts to discourage it. Among the most effective measures, according to researchers, is helping girls attend and stay in school.
The share of young women who were married before age 18 decreased from one in four worldwide in 1997 to nearly one in five in 2022. Aid workers and development officials attribute the reduction to tougher laws, stronger economies and less poverty, as well as more education for girls.
Yet the efforts are off track to meet a United Nations goal of ending the practice by 2030. Some 12 million girls under 18 are married every year worldwide. In the U.S., 315,000 minors were legally married between 2000 and 2021, according to the Columbia report. India has the largest number of girls and women who were married as children, despite efforts to reduce the practice.
Funding that is focused on preventing and reducing child marriage fell to $51 million in 2023 from $76 million in 2019, the Columbia report found. Because of funding restraints, the U.N. said, a global program to end child marriage was directed at 12 million girls last year, four million fewer than the year before.
“Ultimately, this is reversing the progress that we have made,” said Sheema Sen Gupta , Unicef’s global director of child protection and migration. “At the community level, you can see this, you can see it happening.” Where programs have stopped, girls are dropping out of school, she said.
Sierra Leone made child marriage illegal in 2024. Anyone involved in the wedding of a child—from family members to the officiant, decorator and DJ—faces the equivalent of a $4,000 fine.
For a family in a village, that amount means “you’re selling all your traditional land to be able to pay that money, so they are not going to take that risk,” Fatima Maada Bio, the country’s first lady, who pushed for the law, said in an interview. Failure to pay can result in a prison sentence.
She said that more girls have enrolled and stayed in school and universities in the years since she began her campaign in 2018 to prevent child marriage, adding that there are fewer pregnant teens. “We have more girls believing in themselves,” she said.
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com
