About the project

Partner: United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
Project duration: January 2026 – April 2026

Child marriage remains a persistent global issue, deeply rooted in poverty, social norms, and lack of opportunity. Evidence shows that social protection measures such as cash transfers, education subsidies, and health coverage can reduce economic pressures and expand opportunities for adolescent girls, thereby lowering the risk of child marriage. However, national strategies often lack operational clarity on how to systematically integrate social protection interventions into child marriage prevention efforts at scale. In Bangladesh, the prevalence of child marriage remains among the highest globally, with 51 percent of women aged 20-24 years married before the age of 18. While progress has been observed over the past decade, poverty, entrenched gender norms, and practices such as dowry continue to drive early marriage. The Government has introduced a range of social protection initiatives including the Mother and Child Benefit Programme (MCBP) and female secondary school stipend schemes which have contributed to improved school attendance and some reduction in early marriage. Nonetheless, these interventions remain fragmented, with limited coverage for adolescent girls aged 15-17 and insufficient integration with complementary services such as sexual and reproductive health education, vocational training, and community engagement programmes. Strengthening the design and operational linkages between social protection, education, health, and child protection systems will therefore be critical for Bangladesh to accelerate progress towards eliminating child marriage. Embedding child marriage objectives explicitly within national social protection policies such as the forthcoming NSSS II along with enhanced allocative efficiency and accountability, would be critical for accelerating progress towards the national target of eliminating child marriage by 2041.
The purpose of this assignment is to identify key gaps and opportunities within existing social protection systems in preventing child marriage and to provide actionable, evidence-based recommendations for systematically integrating child marriage prevention objectives into social protection programmes.

Objective and scope of the study:
The objective of this study is to identify the gaps within existing social protection systems and programmes in relation to their potential contribution to ending child marriage, and to develop actionable recommendations for strengthening policy and programme design.
Specifically, the study seeks to:

• Assess the current landscape of social protection interventions#including cash transfers, stipends, food security schemes, skills development, and maternal and child benefit programmes#to examine their relevance, coverage, and effectiveness in addressing the economic and social drivers of child marriage.
• Identify gaps and barriers in design, targeting, and implementation that limit the capacity of social protection to prevent child marriage, with particular attention to adolescent girls aged 15-17, out-of-school children, and vulnerable households.
• Analyze integration opportunities between social protection and complementary sectors such as education, health, child protection, and skills/livelihoods, to ensure that interventions address both the structural and normative factors underlying early marriage.
• Examine allocative efficiency within social protection financing to assess whether resources are adequately directed towards populations at the highest risk of child marriage.
• Generate evidence-based recommendations for policymakers and development partners on how social protection can be leveraged more strategically to

• (a) expand opportunities for adolescent girls,
• (b) reduce household economic pressures driving early marriage,
• (b)and (c) accelerate national progress towards eliminating child marriage.