Child marriage is so common in our country. It results in trauma and different kinds of pains for the girls. Yet, parents ignore this fact and marry off their girls, especially in the rural areas, at a very early age.

In a developing country like Bangladesh, mass people don’t even realize and cannot visibilize the harmful sides of child marriage. Bangladesh has the second highest rate of child marriage in the world after Niger. According to reports by (UNICEF) published in 2020, 29% of women aged between 20-24 years in south Asia were married before they even reached 18. When it comes to Bangladesh, the rate, as estimated by UNICEF, is 51%.

The pandemic has just aggravated the situation. According to information provided by the gender justice and diversity department of Brac in March 2021, the rate of child marriage inched up by 13% owing to the adverse impacts of the rogue virus. To our utter surprise, 231 child marriages happened across the country in the first three months (March to June, 2020) of the lockdown.

In Bangladesh, there are several factors which are directly contributing to the high rate of child marriage. The most significant one is the economic considerations associated with marrying off a young girl. To call a spade a spade, girls are not valued as much as boys in our social perspective. They are seen as a burden. Especially, in the families suffering from abject poverty, parents get it in their heads that giving a daughter in marriage will allow them to reduce family expenses as they will have one less person to feed and educate. Meanwhile, dowry is another strong reason. In our society, the groom’s family often agrees to marry off their son to a girl child with a hope of getting a good amount of money. On the other hand, the bride’s family considers the fact that they have to pay less money if the bride is young.

So, what to do in such a backdrop when economic insolvency is pushing the rate higher? The answer lies in the question – economic alternatives can turn out to be a game-changer for the young girls at risks of being married off early.

A recent study has shown promise and ignited a new ray of hope in this regard. According to the findings of a study by Stanford University and Duke University, giving cooking oil as an incentive to the young girls’ families can prevent child marriage. This is amazing as this study indeed gives the policymakers and others working in this field a food for thought on how facilitating families in the rural areas with economic alternatives can put an end to child marriage.

A multi-year study titled ‘A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh’, conducted by Stanford University and Duke University in collaboration with ‘Save the Children’ in Bangladesh from 2007-2017, has revealed startling information. According to the findings, such an initiative reduced child marriage under the age of 18 by 17% and by 18% for those under the age of 16. During the afore-mentioned timeframe, those families were given cooking oil on the condition that they could not get their daughters married off before they turn 18.

The outcome attests the fact that such incentive might work. Our government could also map out something like this to incentivize the families that have girls aged under 18 to persuade them not to opt for child marriage.