SWEDD: Sahel Women's Empowerment and Demographic Dividend Project — Chad

Chad is one of the founding countries of the Sahel Women's Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) project, launched in November 2015 as a joint response by the World Bank Group and United Nations agencies (including UNFPA) to a request from Sahel heads of state. SWEDD funds girls'-education retention, reproductive-health access, and economic-empowerment activities aimed at reducing child marriage and early school leaving.
The World Bank has committed a cumulative $680 million to SWEDD across its phases, including a $376 million financing round approved in 2020 explicitly earmarked to scale up activities already underway in Chad and extend the model to additional countries. A 2024 expansion of the programme provided academic and financial assistance to roughly 127,000 girls in Chad, coinciding with a rise in girls' primary-school attendance to 83%.
SWEDD operates alongside Chad's 2016 law raising the legal minimum marriage age to 18 (with penalties of up to ten years' imprisonment for violators). Nationally representative survey data show the scale of the challenge the programme is up against: a 2014/15 Demographic and Health Survey found 77.9% of women aged 20-24 had married before 18, among the highest rates in Sub-Saharan Africa — underscoring that even a well-funded, decade-long programme has not yet closed the gap. Reported gains rely on programme monitoring data rather than an independent impact evaluation, so should be read as promising but not yet rigorously proven.

Read the full analysis: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6924035/