Each day, more than 41,000 girls worldwide are married while still children, often before they may be physically and emotionally ready to become wives and mothers.

Child marriage, defined as marriage or a union taking place before the age of 18, endangers the life trajectories of these girls in numerous ways. Child brides are at greater risk of experiencing a range of poor health outcomes, having children at younger ages, having more children over their lifetimes, dropping out of school, earning less over their lifetimes and living in poverty than their peers who marry at later ages.

Child brides may also be more likely to experience intimate partner violence, have restricted physical mobility, and limited decision-making ability. Most fundamentally, these girls may be disempowered in ways that deprive them of their basic rights to health, education, equality, non-discrimination, and to live free from violence and exploitation, which continue to affect them into adulthood.

These dynamics affect not only the girls themselves, but their children, households, communities and societies, limiting their ability to reach their full social and economic potential.

While child marriage is widely considered a human rights issue closely connected to gender inequality, the significance of the practice’s impacts at both the individual and societal levels suggests that ending child marriage may play an important role in alleviating poverty and in promoting economic development. Ending child marriage can improve health at the individual and population levels, increase productivity and enhance the opportunity to realize the gains in a country’s economic growth that can result from declining birth rates and a shifting population age structure, commonly referred to as the ‘demographic dividend.

To date, however, there has been relatively little in the way of rigorous assessment of the economic impacts of child marriage or how much child marriage may “cost” countries and societies. To address this challenge, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and the World Bank, with support from GPE, collaborated on an extensive and innovative research project to assess the impacts of child marriage on a range of development outcomes, and to understand the economic costs associated with these impacts across countries. By establishing the effects that child marriage has on economic outcomes, the research project aimed to catalyze more effective and evidence-based action to prevent it.