Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria (opens in new tab)

I run a company that have done over 200 similar studies for various NGOs and international organisations.

In the general case, with some exceptions, we have found that two types of interventions stand above all others in terms of long term positive economic impact:

1. Infrastructure projects - like building roads

2. Gender projects - projects furthering women's rights in some way

These projects are long-term sticky and do not rely on continuous funding. A paved road will remain paved even after the funding is gone, and will have a positive impact on the community for many decades. Roads allow children to go to school in neighbouring villages, and people to sell their goods in a market, use a bike or other vehicle where they otherwise would not be able to.

Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women often has a major impact on the economic output of a community both because more people can contribute, but also because the types of products and services become more diverse. This type of project is also sticky, once attitudes or structural barriers disappear they don't tend to come back.

Education or sanitation initiatives can be hit or miss, where, once funding dries up, all that is left is a non functioning latrine or empty school building.

Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.

It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.

It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.

That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.

Am I misunderstanding something here?

Are people just riffing off the headline, the subheading and the first sentence of this page, is the full paper open access, or has anyone read the more substantial policy brief associated with the study [0]?

That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8

[0a] (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8.pdf

This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.

¹ https://www.gapminder.org/

² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world

Does education of women have to be reduced to keep the population from decreasing? That's the position of some fundamentalist Christians [1], some branches of Islam [2], and many haredi.[3] Used to be considered silly, when overpopulation was a concern, but it's being taken more seriously now.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/technology/replacement-th...

[2] https://tolonews.com/node/198993

[3] https://forward.com/life/326299/putting-academic-study-for-o...

There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.

Major issues with this study:

Key Aspects of Education Costs in NigeriaPrimary & Junior Secondary:

Officially free in public schools, but hidden fees (development levies, PTA) are common.

Federal Technical Colleges: These are tuition-free, with the government covering costs for uniforms and books.

Senior Secondary & Tertiary: Not generally free. State-owned schools, while cheaper than private, still charge fees, and federal universities charge significant "acceptance" or facility fees.

Regional Differences: Free education initiatives can vary significantly by state.

In other words how long the girl stays in school is directly correlated to how much money the family has.

Globally and across modern times two factors reduce female fertility rate: more education and less religious commitment.

> Interventions that address complex, entrenched social problems from various angles simultaneously might be considerably more effective than smaller-scale, cheaper alternatives are.

Is usually true. Bravo.

Unsurprising. If you have nothing else to do with yourself, marriage is kind of the natural thing to look toward. (Besides, for poor families, it reduces the number of mouths you have to feed, though school doesn't make that cheaper, so it isn't the primary cause.) School occupies your time and produces a rationale for not marrying.

In the West, education and then career advancement (and perhaps a pointless desire to "play the field") are reasons for postponing marriage...which has only produced demographic decline. (We ought to recognize human biology and take that as an immutable given, and then structure social practices around it instead of willfully engaging in Procrustean hacks and customs. This would counter demographic decline, because the fix is in essence simple: start having children at a younger age. Everything else should be built around this.)

Pretty sure I ran into info that there is a general correlation between the average level of education for women and natality/population growth globally, and regardless of age.

Don't have any links though.

Always when I read it, I think in Germany https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...

"Act to Prevent Child Marriages is incompatible with the Basic Law due to the failure to address the legal consequences of the invalidation of child marriages concluded abroad"

This shouldn't be a surprise, lots of evidence in other countries to support this

This is the demographic equivalent of overuse of pesticides in the US. People have to stop advocating for shorttermism policies that have been shown to fail over and over again.

There needs to be a very high elementary school flunk rate, banned from school on failure, for girls that slowly decreases over time

Well, there is a general trend: higher education, fewer kids. It's not a 1:1 correlation as many other factors contribute (in particular the higher cost of living; that's an even more important factor if you look at the oddities in South Korea or Japan, and even now in mainland China). Obviously the latter is not "child marriage", but I point at the number of offspring in general.

Maybe the United States can learn something from this

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It feels very 1980s for a magazine called "Nature" looking at African culture like this. Getting an ick feeling.