Abstract
Over the past few years the issue of child marriage has received growing political and programmatic attention. In spite of some progress in a number of countries, global rates have not declined over the past decade. Knowledge gaps remain in understanding trends, drivers and approaches to ending child marriage, especially to understand what is needed to achieve results on a large scale. This commentary summarizes the outcomes of an Expert Group Meeting organized by World Health Organization to discuss research priorities on Ending Child Marriage and Supporting Married Girls. It presents research gaps and recommends priorities for research in five key areas; (i) prevalence and trends of child marriage; (ii) causes of child marriage (iii) consequences of child marriage; (iv) efforts to prevent child marriage; (v) efforts to support married girls.
Highlights
More than 700 million women alive today were married before their 18th birthday [1]. Child marriage is both a grave violation of human rights and a stumbling block to achieving development goals related to gender, health and education [2,3,4,5,6,7]
Progress in reducing rates of child marriage is being made in a number of countries, among younger adolescents [3]
Global rates of child marriage remain alarmingly high and require strengthened policy and programmatic efforts informed by strong evidence of what works
Summary
More than 700 million women alive today were married before their 18th birthday [1]. Child marriage is both a grave violation of human rights and a stumbling block to achieving development goals related to gender, health and education [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Global rates of child marriage remain alarmingly high and require strengthened policy and programmatic efforts informed by strong evidence of what works. To address these gaps in knowledge and to identify research priorities on ending child marriage and supporting married girls, WHO organized an expert group meeting in December 2013 in collaboration with Girls Not Brides and UNICEF.
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