((PKG))  WORLD BANK ANALYST  

((Banner:  An Economist’s View))

((Reporter:  Carol Guensburg, Hayde Adams-Fitzpatrick))

((Camera:  Karina Choudhury)) 

((Edited by:  Phil Dierking, Martin Secrest)) 

((Map:  Washington, D.C.)) 



((Quentin Wodon, Lead Economist, World Bank))
Most of the girls, who marry before 18, do so because there is a lack of viable alternatives.  The best alternative is to keep the girls in school, but it's not always feasible.  You may have the schools being far away.  You may have the schools being too costly to attend.  You may have the schools being of low quality, which means that parents will have a hard time making the financial sacrifices that are necessary for the girls and the boys to remain in school.  It's not so much an issue that, in many contexts, parents do not want to do the best for their daughters. They do, but often there is no alternative.  Then, it may be that parents lead their daughters to be married at a young age, and many parents try to protect their daughters sexually.  But the largest cost for child marriage was related to fertility.  What happens is that if you marry early, you are going to have, on average, more children over your lifetime.  And that has huge implications, in terms of poverty rates, in terms of GDP per capita, and so on.  And we have a large cost, because if you have many more mouths to feed, for example, in your household, that would lead you to have lower levels of consumption per person.  You're going to be poorer.  
The second largest cost is earnings.  Child marriage is not the only reason why girls drop out of school.  There are other reasons, but it's certainly an important reason in many countries.  You often have 20, 30 percent of the girls who drop out of school who do so because of child marriage or pregnancy.  
When girls have lower levels of education, they tend to earn much less in adulthood.  They don't have access to the same jobs.  They're not as qualified.  So, we have a large loss in earnings. 
I'm optimistic in general, and in quite a few countries, you have a large decrease over the last 20 years or so.  You have quite a few of the countries where there has been a lot of progress.  I think there has been a shift in many countries in terms of the thinking, and there has been a realization that it was feasible to reduce dramatically and hopefully end child marriage, and the benefits would be very, very large for the country.