UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
Department of Economics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
PLoS One. 2018 May 24;13(5):e0197928. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0197928. eCollection 2018.
Child marriage harms girls' health and hinders progress toward development goals. Randomized studies have shown that providing financial incentives for girls' education can effectively delay marriage, but larger-scale interventions are needed in light of slow progress toward curbing the practice. Many sub-Saharan African countries eliminated primary school tuition fees over the past two decades, resulting in massive increases in enrolment. We measured the effect of these policies on the probability of primary school completion and of marriage before 15 and 18 years of age.
We used Demographic and Health Surveys to assemble a dataset of women born between 1970 and 2000 in 16 countries. These data were merged with longitudinal information on the timing of tuition fee elimination in each country. We estimated the impact of fee removal using fixed effects regression to compare changes in the prevalence of child marriage over time between women who were exposed to tuition-free primary schooling and those who were not.
The removal of tuition fees led to modest average declines in the prevalence of child marriage across all of the treated countries. However, there was substantial heterogeneity between countries. The prevalence of child marriage declined by 10-15 percentage points in Ethiopia and Rwanda following tuition elimination but we found no evidence that the removal of tuition fees had an impact on child marriage rates in Cameroon or Malawi. Reductions in child marriage were not consistently accompanied by increases in the probability of primary school completion.
Eliminating tuition fees led to reductions in child marriage on a national scale in most countries despite challenges with implementation. Improving the quality of the education available may strengthen these effects and bolster progress toward numerous other public health goals.
童婚危害女孩健康，阻碍发展目标的实现。随机研究表明，为女孩教育提供经济激励可以有效延迟婚姻，但鉴于遏制这一做法的进展缓慢，需要更大规模的干预。过去二十年，许多撒哈拉以南非洲国家取消了小学学费，导致入学人数大幅增加。我们衡量了这些政策对小学完成率和 15 岁和 18 岁前结婚概率的影响。
我们使用人口与健康调查来收集 16 个国家出生于 1970 年至 2000 年之间的女性的数据集。这些数据与各国学费取消的时间长短的纵向信息合并。我们使用固定效应回归来估计收费取消的影响，以比较在有和没有免费小学教育的女性中，儿童婚姻的流行率随时间的变化。
取消学费导致所有受影响国家的儿童婚姻流行率平均略有下降。然而，各国之间存在很大的差异。在埃塞俄比亚和卢旺达，取消学费后，儿童婚姻的流行率下降了 10-15 个百分点，但我们没有证据表明取消学费对喀麦隆或马拉维的儿童婚姻率有影响。儿童婚姻的减少并不总是伴随着小学完成率的提高。
尽管实施方面存在挑战，但在大多数国家，取消学费导致了全国范围内儿童婚姻的减少。提高现有教育质量可能会加强这些效果，并推动实现许多其他公共卫生目标。
