Tipping Point Initiative — Girls'-Group-Led Social Norms Programme Against Child Marriage, Rangpur, Bangladesh

The Tipping Point Initiative is a social-norms intervention designed by CARE to address child marriage, implemented in Bangladesh by the local NGO Gram Bikash Kendra. Girls'-group members led community-wide dialogue on the norms restricting girls' lives — mobility, decision-making about their own marriage, interaction with boys, menstruation, dowry, and collective action for rights — with a second variant (TPP+) adding parent and community-level components on top of the girls'-group curriculum.
The programme was evaluated through a three-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial across 51 villages in Pirgacha sub-district, Rangpur division, with research oversight from icddr,b: 1,275 girls enrolled at baseline (TPP=412, TPP+=420, control=443) and 1,123 retained at endline (88% retention). The headline result was null: child-marriage rates were statistically indistinguishable across arms (TPP 19%, TPP+ 22%, control 20%). A dose-response analysis, however, found that girls who attended 36–40 sessions (highest exposure) had a significantly lower hazard of marriage than lower-exposure peers (adjusted hazard ratio 0.46 in TPP and 0.51 in TPP+, both p=0.03).
Reported honestly, Tipping Point in Bangladesh is a rigorously evaluated case where the population-level intervention did not reduce child marriage, but a clear dose-response relationship suggests the curriculum can work for girls who engage with most of it — a caution against assuming any social-norms programme will scale its effect simply by reaching more people. CARE ran a parallel Tipping Point trial in Nepal and has carried the model into a second phase, giving it demonstrated cross-country transferability even where in-country impact was mixed.

Read the full analysis: https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/documents/1471/Care_Tipping_point_Baseline_executive_summary.pdf