While stories of Boko Haram enslaving girls and burning down schools abound in Western media, counter-trends of local champions leading the way for girls’ education in the West African countries of Nigeria and Mali largely go unnoticed. Despite real challenges—like…
2015 could prove to be a pivotal year for development. In the discussions to come, supporting local leadership in development should be given high priority. Since the revolution of participatory development in the 1970s, local leadership has bubbled up as…
There is growing recognition that girls’ education is an important and fundamental precondition for human security. There seems to be a new commitment among Ministry of Education officials in countries ranging from Malawi to Nigeria to Jordan, especially as discussions…
The year 2014 holds yet another chance to eliminate the harmful traditional practice of child marriage in a long struggle that has consumed the attention of gender activists, public health practitioners and human rights advocates over the past 50 years.…
Twenty years ago, in the department of political science at Bayero University Kano, I came across a poster. “If you think education is expensive; try ignorance” it said. This was my first introduction to a popular Nigerian saying that captures the…
There is much to celebrate in girls’ education. Since the Education for All movement and the setting of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, the number of out-of-school girls at primary school level has dropped from 58.9 million in 2000 to 30.7 million in 2012 and the share of girls that make up the out-of school population has decreased from 58 to 53 percent.
This study mapping early marriage in West Africa is the product of two years of discovery and learning by a team of development researchers. The result is not only an exhaustive report on the current status of the problem and efforts to combat it, but also an important model for future studies in other areas of the world where the practice persists.
This article explores the pattern of early marriage in Africa. It focuses on the sub-Saharan region as an area with the highest rates of early marriage in the world. The harmful effects of early marriage are explored in terms of impact on the health, education and economic well-being of young girls.
The empirical basis for the project was the 2013 Ford Foundation report, Mapping Early Marriage in West Africa which recommended that child marriage interventions be carried out by coalitions of civil society organizations working in partnership with government departments. The…
