CGD Podcast: Tackling Child Marriage with Imran Matin and Kehinde Ajayi

Summary

CGD Podcast: Tackling Child Marriage with Imran Matin and Kehinde Ajayi
Date: March 5, 2026
Host: Rachel Glenister
Guests: Imran Matin (BRAC University/BRAC), Kehinde Ajayi (CGD)

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on the persistent global issue of child marriage, its complex drivers and consequences, and the innovative and evidence-based solutions being implemented, particularly in Bangladesh and across various global contexts. The discussion centers around policy, economic and social drivers, research findings, effective interventions, and funding challenges, with leading voices in the field sharing insights and recommendations for the way forward.

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Breakdown of Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Child Marriage: Scale, Impacts, and Context

[00:42 – 06:58]

• Prevalence & Significance

  • Globally, 1 in 5 women aged 20–24 were married or in union as children.
  • In Bangladesh, despite progress, over 40 million women were married before 18, making it the second-largest country for child marriage after India.

• Consequences

  • Forces girls to drop out of school, early pregnancies in bodies often impacted by malnutrition, long-term psychological and health effects, and adverse labor market and intergenerational outcomes.
  • Quote: “Early marriage basically means the kind of complications that you would get with respect to reproductive health and pregnancy complications and low birth weight and child malnutrition…” — Imran Matin [04:34]

• Varied Global Contexts

  • Nature and drivers of child marriage differ: In Bangladesh, marriages are typically arranged by parents with dowries and little prior acquaintance; elsewhere, unions may be informal or economically driven, impacting intervention strategies.
  • Quote: “When we talk about child marriage in different countries, it means often very different things… In the majority of cases, the marriage is organized by the parents… in other parts of the world you have unions…” — Rachel Glenister [05:16]

2. Trends, Drivers, and Economic Costs

[06:58 – 10:18]

• Mixed Global Progress

  • Some regions (e.g. Central African Republic) are seeing stalled or even rising rates.
  • Factors vary: parental arrangements, economic pressures, education, adolescent agency.

• Economic Impact Analysis

  • Recent CGD research (Ajayi et al.) quantifies the annual cost of child marriage at up to $175 billion across 27 countries.
  • Main drivers: higher under-five and maternal mortality, intimate partner violence, increased miscarriages/abortions, and lost labor/economic productivity.
  • Quote: “Child marriage… costs these countries up to $175 billion a year… focusing on four main drivers: under-five mortality, maternal mortality... intimate partner violence… lost earnings…” — Kehinde Ajayi [08:34]

3. Effective Interventions: What Works?

[10:18 – 18:07]

• Education as a Key Lever

  • Finishing secondary education before marriage is critical; in some contexts, marriage precludes secondary schooling but allows college post-marriage.

• BRAC’s Evidence-based Programs in Bangladesh

  • BRAC’s “Shapna Sharuthi” (Dream Catchers) innovation: Randomized evaluation (four arms: control, empowerment/adolescent clubs, low-cash, and high-cash transfer).
  • Largest reductions in early marriage and dropout rates occurred in the “empowerment plus high-cash” arm.
  • Quote: “In education, we find the impact is more in terms of dropout, reducing dropout rates substantially. And again, we find that impact in the high cash arm, not in the low cash arm at all.” — Imran Matin [13:22]
  • The effectiveness is attributed to higher engagement/attendance when cash transfers are substantial enough.

• Role of Social Perceptions and Social Media

  • Parental fears around elopement, especially influenced by social media, drive early marriage decisions. The intervention had the greatest impact where this risk perception was highest.
  • Quote: “The biggest impact that we find in terms of early marriage reduction is in the subgroup where there is high social media use at baseline and high parental perception of risk.” — Imran Matin [15:37]

4. Other Approaches and the Critical Role of Funding

[18:07 – 22:18]

• Cash Transfers and Legal Reforms

  • Cash transfers can delay marriage, but effectiveness depends on context (dowry/bride price systems).
  • Legal reforms alone are mostly ineffective due to poor enforcement and the prevalence of informal unions circumventing legal minimum ages.
  • Quote: “Legal reform on its own often can be ineffective because we do see either limited enforcement or a shift from formal marriage to… a de facto marriage…” — Kehinde Ajayi [18:46]

• Education and Empowerment Programs

  • Scholarships, transport, female teachers, and life-skills programs all contribute to mitigating child marriage—especially when tailored to specific local drivers.

• Funding Gaps

  • Less than 0.025% of official development assistance targets child marriage directly; even with broader definitions, less than 0.08% of ODA is directed.
  • Quote: “It’s really striking that over the last several years, less than 0.025% of official development assistance was going towards projects with a primary objective of addressing child marriage.” — Kehinde Ajayi [20:05]
  • Examples like Kenya’s Social and Economic Inclusion Project show potential in leveraging social protection to scale adolescent girl-focused interventions.

5. Scaling Up: The Role of Governments and Policy Levers

[22:18 – 28:09]

• Domestic Funding and Ownership

  • Shift from donor-funded to government-funded interventions, especially via education stipends and targeted social protection.

• What Can Realistically Be Scaled?

  • Free or subsidized education, increasing female teacher representation, leveraging social protection infrastructure post-COVID for adolescent-targeted programs.

• Tailoring Design Matters

  • Effective transfer structures can help renegotiate family-adolescent dynamics and incentives, especially if shared between girls and parents.
  • Quote: “How you design the cash transfer is really important… it is renegotiating the bargain and trust between adolescent girls who are slightly older and their parents.” — Imran Matin [26:28]

• Remaining Challenges

  • Need to extend stipends beyond government schools; inclusion of private school attendeees, partnership between NGOs and government for mixed interventions.

• Broader Opportunities

  • Expansion of employment opportunities (e.g., garment factories in Bangladesh) can have beneficial impacts by creating incentives to stay in school.

6. Policy Reflections and Final Recommendations

[28:09 – 31:01]

• Scaling Proven Models

  • “We don’t always have to look for new innovations. I think there are many innovations that already we know work. We just need to find the resources and adapt it in our context to scale it up.” — Imran Matin [29:39]

• Involving Girls in Policymaking

  • “I would have a policy where adolescent girls…get to be part of the policy making process…having adolescent girls and other marginalized groups have a seat at the table…” — Kehinde Ajayi [30:13]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Early marriage… creates much longer term intergenerational consequences…” — Imran Matin [04:34]
• “Child marriage… costs these countries up to $175 billion a year…” — Kehinde Ajayi [08:34]
• “$45 billion a year that countries are losing from earnings because of girls being more likely to drop out of school.” — Kehinde Ajayi [09:30]
• “Legal reform on its own often can be ineffective…” — Kehinde Ajayi [18:46]
• “The biggest impact…is in the subgroup where there is high social media use at baseline and high parental perception of risk.” — Imran Matin [15:37]
• “It is renegotiating the bargain and trust between adolescent girls who are slightly older and their parents.” — Imran Matin [26:28]
• “There is so much of really good models, proven models that are not being scaled up.” — Imran Matin [29:44]
• “Having adolescent girls…have a seat at the table in defining policies…” — Kehinde Ajayi [30:13]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:42 – 06:58: Framing child marriage and its global contexts
• 06:58 – 10:18: Global trends, economic impact analysis
• 10:18 – 18:07: Effective interventions, BRAC’s evidence in Bangladesh
• 18:07 – 22:18: Funding inadequacy, global approaches, and integration into social protection
• 22:18 – 28:09: Domestic policy, scaling interventions, design challenges
• 28:09 – 31:01: Policy recommendations and wrap-up

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Energy and Tone

The discussion is earnest, evidence-driven, and solution-focused, with an undercurrent of optimism tempered by realism about political, financial, and social barriers. Both guests convey urgency, but also hope for scaling what works and meaningfully involving those most affected—adolescent girls—in decision-making.

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For further information and links to referenced research and programs, visit: https://cgdev.org

Transcript

[Rachel Glenister]

Health, education, climate, the United nations, the

[Imran Mateen]

World bank, private actors, locally rooted institutions, locally rooted experts.

[Rachel Glenister]

What we're really talking about is a very complex ecosystem.

[Imran Mateen]

How do we find the interlinks to

[Rachel Glenister]

innovate and come up with the best solutions to actually rethink what we do

[Kehinde Adjay]

as a broader development community? You're listening to the CGD podcast where

[Imran Mateen]

we explore smart policies for a better world.

[Rachel Glenister]

Each episode highlights an important development topic

[Imran Mateen]

hosted by a CGD researcher and featuring

[Rachel Glenister]

experts from around the globe.

[Kehinde Adjay]

Tune in to learn how independent research

[Rachel Glenister]

can bring global prosperity. Welcome to the CGD Podcast. I'm Rachel Glenister, President of the center for Global Development. Today we're talking about child marriage. One in five women aged 20 to 24 were married or in a union while they were still a child. This has profound impacts on their life and their future trajectory. They have to drop out of school to get married. They often then have children quite young. In countries where malnutrition is poor and becoming a bride and a mother while you're still a child has important psychological impacts. Joining me today are two economists who have not just thought a lot about child marriage, but are doing something to address it. First, Eran Mateen is Executive Director of BRAC University's Institute for Governance and Development and formerly head of BRAC's research department and also deputy of BRAC International. Now, if you don't know, BRAC is a the world's largest non governmental organization and in my view one of its most innovative and evidence based. I'm also joined by Kehinde Adjay, Senior Fellow at CGD and director of CGD's gender equality and Inclusion Program. Along with CGD colleagues, Kehinde has just completed analysis of the cost of inaction on child marriage and the state of global funding to address it. Welcome Imran and Kehinde.

[Kehinde Adjay]

Thank you Rachel, Great to be here.

[Imran Mateen]

Thank you.

[Rachel Glenister]

Imran, you work in Bangladesh and Bangladesh has made a lot of progress in many aspects of gender equality and it has made progress on child marriage. But it is still the second largest country for child marriage in the world after India with over 40 million young women who are married or or in a Union before they're 18. Can you tell us why you think the rate of child marriage is still persistently high in Bangladesh? And also just give us a picture of what it means for girls to get married while they're still children.

[Imran Mateen]

Bangladesh now, and especially compared to even our neighboring countries in South Asia, progress have been relatively less. But I think historically if one just looks at Bangladesh itself, there has been reduction. It has stalled slightly during COVID but I think it's reducing. But what's really important is that though the aggregate rates remain to be not reducing at a very high rate, there is a structural shift that is happening, as you would know. So now the problem is really marriage after 15, 16 years old and not so much before 15 years old. Some of the more worse forms in some ways have been reducing. Now I think what this basically means is that the nature of the problem shifts from just being perhaps a simpler problem around poverty and of parental decision making to one where it is about adolescent sexual agency and adolescents own choices as well. We've been doing some interesting research in that area in terms of, you know, what is the effect of those perceptions and how that contributes to child marriage and what can we do about it. From BigD, the institute that I run, we have been doing a very innovative program that BRAC is running right now where they're trying to tackle essentially this more complex problem of early marriage. So in early marriage, one of the first things that happens is discontinuation of education and the formation of the human capital that would come from the kind of education from schooling. And this happens primarily at the secondary school level and beyond secondary school level where actually the human capital formation is the most important. So I think that clearly has got long term labor market outcome challenges, of course, and then pregnancy. Right. Childbirth happens very soon after marriage. So early marriage basically means the kind of complications that you would get with respect to reproductive health and pregnancy complications and low birth weight and child malnutrition and so and so forth. So you really create much longer term intergenerational consequences of early marriage.

[Rachel Glenister]

Yeah. When I was working on this issue in Bangladesh and was interviewing girls, it was very striking that because of the levels of stunting in Bangladesh, you're thinking about having pregnancy in these somewhat pretty frail and not developed bodies, which causes problems. Kehinde, let me turn to you for the global picture. But before I do that, I think it's really worth making clear that when we talk about child marriage in different countries, it means often very different things. So in Bangladesh, when you get married, you have a dowry and that's a big financial commitment for the parents. In the majority of cases, the marriage is organized by the parents. And I think in our survey only 1% of people had even met their future spouse before. Whereas in other parts of the world you have unions. Which is why when I defined it, I said marriage or unioned. When Women are still under the age of 18, and that can still have the same consequences of getting pregnant and dropping out of school. But if you it might not be a formal marriage. So given that picture of different ways that marriage works and unions work across the world, what's happening across the world, whether places are having the same kind of improvement, but not dramatic improvement as in Bangladesh, or whether some places are doing worse than Bangladesh and seeing very little progress at all?

[Kehinde Adjay]

Yeah, that's a great question, Rachel. And a really important point to emphasize is that, first of all, the rates of child marriage across the globe are very different. And we have some places like Bangladesh, where still over half of women who were aged 20 to 24 were married before they turned 18. And we have places where the prevalence is much lower. The questions you asked about trends that we've seen over time. So there are places that have made a lot of gain. In Bangladesh, for example, the rate was over 75% in 1997 to 25 years ago. And so it's dropped substantially, even though, as Imran mentioned, less than in other countries. There's some places, like Central African Republic, where we're actually seeing, unfortunately, not just a stall, but slight increases in the rates of child marriage. So there is a very different distribution of progress. And there are also very different drivers. As you mentioned, in some places it is more a case of parents arranging marriages and this happening at very much younger ages. In other places, there are more economic drivers. So in some places, like Bangladesh, almost all childbearing is within marriage. And in other places, we don't see such a tight connection. So in some places, getting pregnant means you have to get married, and that's one of the drivers. But in other places, you know, about half of adolescent pregnancy occurs outside of marriage. In some places, it's a question of education. We see this as the strongest, most consistent driver of delays in child marriage. But overall, they're just very different factors that drive it across different countries, within countries and across space.

[Rachel Glenister]

But in some ways, the consequences are quite similar in the sense that people have to drop out of school you

[Kehinde Adjay]

mentioned in the introduction. So, along with Gabriela Smorelli and Radhika Nagesh at cgd, we've just finished up an analysis of the economic costs of inaction using data from 27 countries that represent 70% of child marriages across the world. And what we find is that child marriage, if we were to put an economic cost on, cost these countries up to $175 billion a year. And this is just focusing on four main drivers. One is the under five mortality. So we have increases in child mortality precisely for the reasons you and Imran just mentioned. The fact that we have these young bodies getting pregnant and childbirth is much more risky for both the mothers and the children who are born. The children have lower birth weights and lower chances of survival. We see also increases in maternal mortality, which we estimate between about 123 million deaths a year and $139 billion a year coming from increases in child mortality and maternal mortality and then also increases in experience of intimate partner violence and experience of miscarriage and abortion. So we have those health impacts and then we also have impacts on education. And this leads to increases in costs from lost earnings. So girls who get married as children are more likely to drop out of school. They're less likely to particip in the labor force, and when they do participate, they tend to earn less. And so we estimate that there's $45 billion a year that countries are losing from earnings because of girls being more likely to drop out of school. And we rarely see child brides enrolling in school. So there is a. Beyond the health concerns, beyond the human rights concerns, there's a real economic impact or economic consequences of child marriage and an incentive to address it from an economics perspective.

[Rachel Glenister]

Yeah, and I think it's worth coming back to Imran's point about the difference between very early child marriage under 15 and then 16, 17 year olds who are getting married and the shift in Bangladesh. I think there's surprisingly little research on this. Actually a lot of what we see are correlations. But it does seem as though a lot of the health impacts are particularly important for, for those very young 14, 15 year olds who are getting married. But the education impacts can be very severe if you drop out of school without completing secondary school, which often 18 is around the time that you finish secondary school. We found in our research that just delaying marriage till you're 18 and finish secondary school actually has a big impact because it's socially acceptable in Bangladesh to keep going to college after you're married, but you can't go to school. So you can just get people up to the end of secondary school and then they get married. They can actually continue their education in college. So let's talk about solutions. We do have some programs that have worked. So Imran Brac has been working with adolescent girls for many years, both in Bangladesh and across Africa. Can you tell us some of the things that you've had rigorously tested and have found to be effective? In addressing the challenges adolescent girls face in early pregnancy and marriage.

[Imran Mateen]

For brac, this whole problem of child marriage has been always linked with how to really provide interventions through which adolescents can be more empowered. Of course, at this age, economic empowerment would be really preparing for subsequent choices to be able to navigate and to be able to negotiate. For BRAC organizing people have always been at the heart of any development intervention. Even in the case of adolescents, been organizing them in the form of some groups, club based activities and providing them different types of life skill oriented sessions. As a part of that, we are inspired a lot, Rachel, by work that you have done in terms of the whole cash transfer dimension of it and seeing such high impact. I think there was a lot of interest in BRAC in terms of seeing, testing whether combining the empowerment interventions that BRAC does very well along with a transfer, what are the additional impact that we basically get? So the institute that I run, BigD, we have been evaluating a very exciting program that BRAC has started on tackling child marriage. Primarily it's called Shapna Sharuthi, which means dream catches, started in 2023. So there are four arms, one pure control. And we have the adolescent club, the empowerment arm, the shopnu sharuthi, pure arm. That is what BRAC usually does. And then we have two other arms. One is with low cash, which is about 5, 600 taka per month until they are 18. Another one which we call high cash, which is 1000 takam, slightly more than that 600 takam. We find a number of very interesting impacts. In the midline we find that the pure shop no sharuthi along with high cash has the most impact. Shopno Sharuti itself has an impact on early marriage, but moderate level of impact, but that too in the longer run, not in the mid term. Shopnu sharuthi pure with low cash does not really have an additional impact. So I think that is really interesting and the way this impact is happening on early marriage and also in education. In education, we find the impact is more in terms of dropout, reducing dropout rates substantially. And again, we find that impact in the high cash arm, not in the low cash arm at all. So what is happening here, we think is that actually the attendance rate, the participation rate in the program is much higher. The engagement rate is much higher in the high cash arm, substantially higher than it is for low cash or just shopping. So it is that higher level of regular participation. And that engagement we think is having an effect. So it is the cash plus the engagement that is happening in the high cash arm that is perhaps together creating a much higher level of impact that we are seeing both in early marriage and in terms of education dropout. And you know, thousand taka per month is quite comparable to the education stipend program that Bangladesh government currently provides. So it's not really crazy amount in terms of real scale up. And you know, the other very interesting thing that we found is that social media usage is quite highly correlated with this parental perception of elopement, elopement risk. And this fear itself translates into early marriage decisions, if you like, which basically parents make. So it is that perceived risk. And if you can somehow, to borrow a word Rachel, you use is if you can somehow create disturbance in the signals, if you like, that these perceptions create, we may be jumble up the signal in some ways, if you like, then we may be able to shift this. And this is exactly what we find. The biggest impact that we find in terms of early marriage reduction is in the subgroup where there is high social media use at baseline and high parental perception of risk. That is the group where we find the biggest impact in terms of reduction in early marriage. So this is I think quite a promising intervention here.

[Rachel Glenister]

Very exciting to hear these new results revealed on the podcast. And I think just to give some background, because you were referring to work that I have done that I've mentioned various surveys in Bangladesh, but this was a finding that if you provide an incentive to not marry your daughter while she's a child, then we saw a 19% fall in child marriage. So this is a regular payment that would be paid to families while they have unmarried adolescent girls and stops if they get married. So you are adding that to another program on empowerment. But I should say in this case, the empowerment program you're talking about didn't have an effect on its own. But in various studies in sub Saharan Africa where BRAC did these girls clubs and Life Skills, I think a bit more intensively than you're currently doing in Bangladesh, it did reduce teenage pregnancy quite a lot. Again, that was the big risk in sub Saharan Africa was teenage pregnancy and then leading to dropping out of school. Life Skills worked for that in Sub Saharan Africa. This dowry payment and real risk that parents feel that girls might elope or might be tainted by being seen talking to boys and therefore won't get a good match is very important in places like Bangladesh and South Asia. And it is very much a financial decision and dowries actually go up. The amount you have to pay to marry your daughter goes up as she gets older. So offsetting that financial burden. So it's not more costly to marry a daughter when she's older actually seems to really move the needle. So it's great that you're finding that in your case. Kehinde, can you tell us about what approaches have been tried elsewhere?

[Kehinde Adjay]

Yeah, as you were talking about dowry, this is one thing that really varies whether marriage is associated with dowry or bride price. So whether you get paid for providing a daughter or whether you have to pay when your daughter gets married, that really does inform what an effective solution is. So you can imagine if the incentive to marry your daughter is because you might get a payment for them getting married. That's going to lead to a different set of solutions than if, in order to marry your daughter, you do need to have some additional funding. We have seen that the effectiveness of cash transfers and conditionality around cash transfers really does depend on what the dynamics of the marriage market are. And another thing that people often think about intuitively as being something that would address child marriage but has had mixed success is laws. And the key takeaway is that legal reform on its own often can be ineffective because we do see either limited enforcement or a shift from formal marriage to marriage that is not yet formalized, but a de facto marriage, basically where people are in these unions and are living as married but not going through the formal thing until it's the legal age. So that in and of itself has had limited impact. And the other thing that people often think about is social norms change. And that has proved to be also quite difficult to systematically scale up and implement things that will address social norms. But what we have seen, as I mentioned earlier, having broad impacts are things related to education. So scholarships for girls, pre secondary education, things to support transport for girls, making schools more girls friendly where you have more female teachers, especially in rural areas where there are concerns about girls being in environments where there are a lot of men, not just rural areas, but places where you have fewer female teachers. And some of the things that come into these ELA Empowerment, Livelihood and traveler lessons type of programs which are about having mentors for girls and giving them role models, those type of things related to education and incentives for education really do tend to have strong impacts. And then this economic strengthening types of interventions that you mentioned, Rachel, but something that often comes up that's associated with this that I do want to highlight is the questions of funding this. And in working on this report, we collaborated with Girls Not Prize Girls First Fund and published what yout Fund to integrate some analysis on the current funding landscape. And it's really striking that over the last several years, less than 0.025% of official development assistance was going towards projects with a primary objective of addressing child marriage. And similarly, if we look at a broader definition of funding, so funding to projects that have ending child marriage as one of multiple objectives or as one of their result indicators, only 0.08% of total ODA goes to that. So there's a very small amount of funding that is dedicated towards this issue and a lot of scope for thinking about how can we better design education projects, social protection projects, reproductive health projects tailored to address the particular needs of adolescent girls and leverage these type of investments, which tend to take up quite a bit of both government domestic funding as well as oda. How can we leverage these pockets of funding to better address the issue of child marriage and really integrate some of the insights from these evaluations from the large body of evidence that we have on what is effective of addressing child marriage. We're seeing a lot of the countries that have historically been the largest funders of interventions to address child marriage cutting down their funding even more than the overall funding cuts that we're seeing. And so it's really a crucial time to think about domestic funding to address child marriage. So one example that comes from Kenya is the Kenya Social and Economic Inclusion Project, which is a project that's jointly financed by the Kenyan government and the World bank and is integrating a focus on adolescent girls. So using this social protection system to support adolescent girls at scale through an intervention that is like the project that BRAC has really been a leader in developing and demonstrating the effectiveness of.

[Rachel Glenister]

Just to follow up on this funding point, increasingly middle income countries, including lower middle income countries, are having to fund their own solutions to development problems. And one of the things they have prioritized, interestingly, is education. And as you saw democratization go across Africa, you saw free education follow with it, because that's something people really care about and politicians who are responding to pressure from the population. What of these solutions do you think will be taken on by governments and what won't be? I'll ask Kehinde first and then end up with Imran.

[Kehinde Adjay]

I will start off by referencing some of my CGD colleague Dave Evans work which is finding that a lot of things that are good for improving education overall can be effective at improving girls educational moment. So within the education system we do find, and there's a lot of work demonstrating this, that when you do make education free, it often does support increased enrollment for girls. Especially from vulnerable areas. But complementing that as much as possible with targeted interventions also can be helpful to offset costs. So in terms of what I think governments are going to adopt, certainly free education, as you mentioned, partly for these political economy reasons, but also thinking about teaching, and this is one that I think can be lower cost than providing free secondary education. Education is thinking about how can you get more women as teachers and how can you get them in areas where there are limited representation of girls. And that is something that I think governments could take up. But also I do think within the social protection system, we do see that, especially after Covid, there's a lot of infrastructure that was strengthened in terms of targeting and identifying vulnerable households and linking that with complementary interventions to support adolescent girls. I think that is also an opportunity where we can see that being used. For example, if you're giving cash transfers to households, already attaching some of these insights that you mentioned, like conditionality that is linked to child marriage or girls enrollment, depending on the context and what the drivers are, or even self conditionality with messaging, even if it's not enforced. But you know, using an opportunity of having connections to these households to say girls education is really important, communicating what the benefits are of delaying child marriage and using these entry points to support vulnerable households to address these issues.

[Rachel Glenister]

Yeah, I'm slightly less optimistic on trying to persuade people because we found in our Bangladesh surveys that people thought that girls should stay in school. But these financial pressures really.

[Kehinde Adjay]

Yeah, I do think against it. Yeah. So really, the social protection system, leveraging that as a way to scale up transfers, I think is really a promising avenue.

[Rachel Glenister]

Yeah. No, that's expensive.

[Kehinde Adjay]

It is expensive.

[Rachel Glenister]

Imran, what hope do you have for you found this effective program in Bangladesh? I know BRAC was seeking to do a program that was cheaper than its previous program that was effective, but very much relied on donor support, which ended up drying up. So what's your hope for how you get this new program funded?

[Imran Mateen]

The education stipend program that we currently have can be a very good platform for this. And there's a lot of political.

[Rachel Glenister]

When you say you have the Bangladesh government.

[Imran Mateen]

Bangladesh government? Yeah, yeah, Bangladesh government. I'm talking as a citizen here. Yes, yes. So I think because there is a lot of political. And this is something that successive governments have been scaling, continuing, and the current government started this. So they are going to be really excited about using the education stipend program more innovatively, more effectively, scaling it up further and so and so forth. So that gives me a lot of hope. With a few caveats. So one is, I think, because the problem much more right now is around the secondary education part.

[Rachel Glenister]

Yeah.

[Imran Mateen]

And it's more adolescent girls who. Our transfer is to adolescent girls and 50% of the transfer is given to adolescent girls every month. And. And the rest, 50% is turned into a lump sum and provided after they're 18 year old to the adolescent girl. But obviously parents get also quite interested in that lump sum. Now, how you design the cash transfer is really important and we don't have any experimental evidence on that. But our qualitative work and our process evaluation work that we are doing suggest that this is really important because it is renegotiating the bargain and trust between adolescent girls who are slightly older and their parents. And this is where you need to really reward both. It's not about the amount of money so much, it is how we design this. And I think it is absolutely possible. This would require innovation, it would require partnership between NGOs and the government to be able to really design this and basically deliver this. Because the other part is of course, the social empowerment bit, which we believe is really important because it is the social empowerment bit, along with the higher cash together that has this big impact. So I think that's also very important. And that would be how we embed this within either curriculum or extracurricular activities within the school. And then the final problem in the policy scaling up is that this education stipend is only for government schools, but we have large majority, especially in the secondary level, where this problem is in private and other types of schools. So that needs to be scaled up as well. So there are these type of challenges. But I think the policy platform for this and the instrument for this is going to be the education stipend.

[Rachel Glenister]

So at least there's something there to work with. When you were talking, it just reminded me that there are other things that have been found to work on child marriage that we haven't talked about, which is job opportunities again in Bangladesh, but some evidence from India too of something similar, which is when a garment factory arrives in Bangladesh in a particular location, you see a reduction in child marriage, which I think is a little bit counter to what garment factories and women working in them, as seen as negative in many parts of the West. But actually it's an incentive for girls to invest in education because they think they can get a job. And we've seen similar things in India. It's great to talk to you both about all the different things that feed into this complicated issue of child Marriage, which differs around the world, is different at different ages but has large consequences on the future of women and countries where they are because it often means dropping out of school, that means less productivity and particularly at earlier ages, means potentially big health costs. So it's really an urgent issue that we need to address. So as we wrap up, if there was one policy you could change in the world, could be about child marriage, could be about something else, what would it be? And I'll start with you Imran.

[Imran Mateen]

I think it will be a meta level policy that we don't always have to look for new innovations. I think there are many innovations that already we know work. We just need to find the resources and adapt it in our context to scale it up. And I think it is really so wasteful that there's so much of really good models, proven models that are not being scaled up. And I think that would be a meta level policy that I'll really push for.

[Rachel Glenister]

Okay, more evidence based policy making. Music to my ears Kehinde.

[Kehinde Adjay]

So I'll pick up on what Imran had mentioned about the foundation for brac's work being about agency. And so for this I would have a policy where adolescent girls and whoever in a society is seen as the people who would primarily benefit or be impacted by policy get to be part of the policy making process. And so having adolescent girls at the forefront or a seat at the table, terms of defining education policy, sexual reproductive health policy, training, livelihoods, those type of policies, the labor market policy. So they could say how would I shape this policy to make sure that it supported me and my interests rather than being the recipient of whatever grownups are deciding whoever the power holders are really having adolescent girls and other marginalized groups have a seat at the table in defining policies.

[Rachel Glenister]

Okay, Ambitious but hopeful suggestion from Kehinde. Thank you both for joining us. This has been a great discussion and thank you listeners. Join us again shortly for our next session.

[Imran Mateen]

Thanks for listening to the CGD podcast.

[Rachel Glenister]

You can learn more more about the topics discussed on our [e-mail] that's cgdev.org

[Kehinde Adjay]

see you next time.

[Imran Mateen]

Sam.