By 2030, child marriage could cost developing economies trillions of US dollars, thus hampering efforts by the international community to end poverty in these countries. This was revealed by the World Bank in a report made public on Tuesday.

Entitled “Economic Impacts of Child Marriage”, the report notes that despite the fact that the number of early marriages (under 18) in many developing countries has decreased, the actual rate is still extremely high.

According to experts from the World Bank and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), one out of three girls is married before 18 and one out of five girls give birth before the same age. Worse even, every two seconds, a young girl is wedded, states the study which was financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and Global Partnership for Education.

“Every day more than 41,000 girls marry before the age of 18. Poverty, gender inequality, poor access to quality education and to youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health services, and a lack of decent employment opportunities, help perpetuate child marriage and early childbirths. […]These will all need to be addressed for countries to successfully end this harmful and costly practice”, said Suzanne Petroni, ICRW’s Project Director and co-author of the report.

Moreover, statistics from the document show that three out four childbirths are from mothers of less than 18. Also, girls that marry early (13 years old) have in average 26% more children than girls that wait till they are more than 18 to marry.

This strengthens the belief according to which ending child marriage will reduce fecundity rates by 11% average in the 15 countries covered by the study. Niger which is at the top of the list in this regard could, by doing so, reduce its demographic growth by 5%, by 2030. Decreasing the rate of fecundity in Uganda could help it save more than $2.4 billion.

Better even, more than $500 billion could be saved each year till 2030 by reducing demographic expansion, the report highlights. Also, decrease in mortality of less than five years old, reduction of malnutrition-driven cases of child stunting could save more than $90 billion every year, till 2030, worldwide. Budget dedicated to education could also be reduced by 5% giving more margin to authorities in terms of sustainable education policies.

Fiacre E. Kakpo