More Than Brides Alliance — "Marriage: No Child's Play" in Niger

Niger has among the highest rates of child marriage in the world: Demographic and Health Survey data from 2012 found about 76% of women aged 20–24 had married before age 18, and 28% before age 15. Between 2016 and 2020, the More Than Brides Alliance — a consortium of Save the Children Netherlands, Oxfam Novib and Simavi, funded by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs — ran a girls'-empowerment programme called "Marriage: No Child's Play" in Niger's Tillabéri and Maradi regions, delivered through local NGOs including SOS Femmes et Filles Victimes de Violence Familiale, ADD Fassali, SongES, ASEC Mungane and ANBEF. The programme combined life-skills mentoring, safe spaces and community dialogue aimed at delaying marriage for girls aged 12–19.

The programme was evaluated by the Population Council using a quasi-experimental, matched-comparison design with repeat cross-sectional surveys of adolescent girls in intervention and comparison villages at baseline (2016/17), midline (2018) and endline (2020), published in PLOS ONE in 2023 alongside parallel evaluations of the same model in India, Malawi and Mali.

The results were mixed and are reported honestly here rather than being framed as a success. On the programme's central goal, the evaluation found no beneficial effect on marriage rates: the share of girls ever married fell in both intervention villages (25.7% to 15.9%) and comparison villages (37.7% to 15.9%), with comparison villages actually declining faster, producing a difference-in-differences result that was only marginally significant (p=.098) and in the unfavourable direction. On secondary outcomes, the programme did show significant gains: knowledge of the legal minimum marriage age rose from 15.0% to 29.6% in intervention villages (versus 19.3% to 19.8% in comparison villages), and the share of girls currently earning income rose sharply from 23.8% to 67.1% in intervention villages.

The evaluators — an independent academic and NGO research team, not the implementing alliance itself — conclude that community-based empowerment programming can shift girls' knowledge and economic activity, but caution that this particular model did not demonstrate a causal effect on delaying marriage in the Niger context within the evaluation period. The programme itself ended in 2020 and no evidence of continuation or further replication in Niger was found.

Read the full analysis: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0281413