Giving cash to families can help bring down child marriage rates

Sudarno Sumarto,
Harvard Kennedy School

Providing cash transfers to low-income families can reduce child marriage rates among girls living in rural communities.

That is what we found in a recent study looking at the impact of social assistance programs that gave money to families in Indonesia.

In 2006, the government of Indonesia started to roll out the Program Keluarga Harapan, or Family Hope Program. It consisted of a cash transfer to poor families on condition that they send children to school and that expectant mothers show up for prenatal health care appointments. The monthly stipends equate to about 40% of total monthly household expenditures in their communities.

Today, the program supports about 10 million households annually and is considered the second-largest such program in lower- and middle-income countries worldwide.

We analyzed data from Indonesia’s poverty-targeting database, which is used to select program beneficiaries based on their income.

Our sample comprised about 1 million girls ages 14 to 17, drawn from all villages where the program operated from 2012 to 2014.

We compared girls who live in households just above and just below the wealth eligibility cutoff for the program. Essentially, this strategy assumes that these households are very similar, but some get the money while other’s don’t.

We found that the program reduced the incidence of child marriages by about 3.5 percentage points, from 8.7 to 5.2.

About 650 million girls alive today were married as children.

Though most countries have instituted laws prohibiting marriages under the age of 18, child marriages remain common in many regions of the world.

The continued existence of child marriage is worrisome for several reasons. Research has linked child marriage to higher infant and maternal mortality, a higher risk of sexually transmitted diseases, more exposure to domestic violence, reduced decision-making power inside marriage, lower educational attainment and worse health and labor market outcomes.

Since child marriage rates tend to be higher among poorer households, many researchers have argued that income constraints are a main reason why poor households marry off their daughters at very young ages.

Consequently, researchers have explored whether policies that address poverty, including through measures such as giving people cash, can help reduce child marriages.

Our study is among the first to provide large-scale evidence of a cash-transfer program’s success drawn from a conventional, government-implemented social assistance program.

Because cash transfers also affect other areas such as health and education, it isn’t known the exact pathway in which they reduce child marriages – that is to say, it could be that being in better health and getting more years of education can reduce the chances that a girl will marry.

For example, girls with better access to education can earn higher pay and therefore may not feel the same pressure to marry early. And boys who spend more time in school may move to cities for higher-paying jobs. In that case, fewer single men are around in rural areas, leading to delays in local marriages.

We plan to stay in touch with the Indonesian government regarding its attempts to further bring down child marriage rates. Likewise, we plan to conduct follow-up studies with the specific social assistance program Program Keluarga Harapan and other government programs to study their effects.

[Abridged]