Child marriage in conflict settings: a geospatial analysis

Child marriage is a harmful practice and child rights violation that disproportionately affects girls, with negative impacts on their health, education, and opportunities in life. While child marriage is common in both development and humanitarian contexts, financial stress or heightened insecurity for girls from violence suggest that the practice is more prevalent in fragile settings. Using georeferenced data on armed conflict and population-level microdata for marriages of more than 2 million women across 56 countries, we estimate the impact of the occurrence and severity of conflict events in or before the year of marriage on the incidence of child marriage. Our results show that the incidence of marriage before age 18 for women in clusters located within a conflict zone in or the five years prior to the year of marriage was between 4.5% points and 16.4% points higher than for girls not affected by conflict, with risk increasing with severity of conflicts.