Skills-Building Programs to Reduce Child Marriage in Bangladesh: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Mapping the patchwork: Exploring the subnational heterogeneity of child marriage in India

“…The use of mass media creates opportunities for program messages to reach beyond direct intervention recipients, thus expanding and amplifying the potential reach and effects of the program. Diffusion of this sort has been seen in many programs aiming to shift norms and behaviors, as well as within child marriage prevention programs in diverse settings including India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia ( Amin, Saha, & Ahmed, 2018 ; Gage, 2013 ; Mehra et al., 2018 ; Nguyen et al., 2019 ; Starmann et al., 2018 ). Connectivity, including to one's neighbors and communities, is one of the main ways that these messages can spread, and there is evidence to suggest that these diffusion pathways can be explicitly integrated into program design ( Cislaghi et al., 2019a ; Starmann et al., 2018 ).…”

Early marriage and early childbearing in South Asia: trends, inequalities, and drivers from 2005 to 2018

“…Nongovernmental organizations are also very active, and recently, interventions, such as the Bangladeshi Association for Life skills, Income, and Knowledge for Adolescents (BALIKA) project, have demonstrated success: community-level EM reduction by 25-30% in an 18-month period. 37 Keys to success in the BALIKA project included engaging adolescents at a young age, creating a favorable community environment toward later marriage, building tangible skills to empower girls, and recruiting educated mentors from the community. It remains to be seen if such programs, when scaled to the national level, would be both effective and cost-effective.…”

Measuring gender attitudes using list experiments

“…There are also a number of other developing country studies that have evaluated related programs and their impact on gender attitudes and outcomes. These include the "empowerment and livelihoods for adolescents" (ELA) training scheme in Uganda (Bandiera et al 2018), BALIKA (Bangladeshi Association for Life Skills, Income, and Knowledge for Adolescents) in Bangladesh (Amin et al 2018) and Kishori Kendra (KK) scheme of training-based gender empowerment and financial incentives to delay marriage in Bangladesh (Buchmann et al 2018). Both ELA and KK include safe space components where, in clubs, adolescents receive life skill lessons about gender rights and sexual education.…”

“…For example, the ADP scheme's dosage was 96 hours total for 1 year. In contrast, girls in the safe space groups in Bangladesh received about 200 hours of training in over 6 months (Buchmann et al 2018), 144 hours total in BALIKA scheme in Bangladesh (Amin et al 2018) and over 500 hours in five sessions per week for 2 years in the ELA project in Uganda (Bandiera et al (2018). 26 In this context, ELA and KK are both variants of the scheme to which our sample respondents are exposed.…”