Push community intervention reduced rates of child marriage by 80%

Nature ( 2026 ) Cite this article
Globally, as many as 12 million girls marry before the age of 18 every year; in northern Nigeria, 80% of girls marry before 18 (refs.

1 , 2 ).

Although such marriages may be deemed the best available option by many girls and parents, numerous studies suggest that, when delayed marriage is made possible, it benefits educational attainment, improves health by reducing maternal mortality and morbidity, and leads to many other benefits to girls’ lives 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 .

Despite this, little is known about what reduces child marriage, and successful interventions tend to have an impact of just a few percentage points.

We use a paired cluster-randomized trial in 18 communities to rigorously evaluate a locally tailored big-push intervention called Pathways to Choice in northern Nigeria.

We show that Pathways decreases rates of marriage among adolescent girls from 86% in the control group to only 21% in the treatment group—just over an 80% decrease.

Although a key part of Pathways’ effect is a significant increase in girls re-enrolling in school, education alone cannot explain its effects on child marriage.

We argue that Pathways’ whole-community focus reduces the likelihood of social backlash and contributes meaningfully to its success.

Our results demonstrate that a big push can significantly alter entrenched, normative behaviour around child marriage, and that bundled interventions may be greater than the sum of their parts.

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Fig.

1: Rates of remaining unmarried among adolescent girls measured two years after programme start.

Fig.

2: Effects of the Pathways programme on educational, social and attitudinal outcomes measured two years after programme start.

Fig.

3: Heterogeneity by community and family factors.

Fig.

4: Pathways effects relative to other evaluations.

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The de-identified datasets corresponding to this study are available in the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/899DIN .

All analysis for this paper was conducted using StataSE 18.

Replication files and de-identified data are available via the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/899DIN .

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We thank all of those who provided invaluable feedback and guidance on this paper, including seminar audiences at Northwest Development Workshop, the Pacific Conference for Development Economics, the Center for Studies of African Economies, Advances with Field Experiments, the New England Universities Development Consortium, the California Polytechnic State University and Brown University.

We also thank E.

Field, A.

Griffith, J.

Kerwin, E.

Nix, R.

Thornton, E.

Riley, A.

Voena, R.

Pande, M.

Lowe and many others for their helpful comments and suggestions.

We gratefully acknowledge the work of the Centre for Girls Education in Abuja, Nigeria and funding from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.

We also gratefully acknowledge OASIS ( www.oasissahel.org ; formerly L’Initiative OASIS in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley) for providing both financial support and technical assistance in the implementation and learning process of the Pathways to Choice programme evaluated in this research.

We thank J.

Wang and F.

Santamarina for excellent research assistance.

This paper has previously circulated under the title ‘Pathways to Choice: Delaying Marriage and Increasing Education via Safe Spaces’.

The views presented are our own, and do not necessarily represent the views of any organization.

All errors are our own.

University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Centre for Girls Education, Abuja, Nigeria
Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar
I.C.

was responsible for data cleaning and analysis, and wrote the majority of the paper.

M.A.

implemented the Pathways programme at the Centre for Girls Education, provided essential background information and helped to clarify issues that arose during data cleaning and analysis.

M.A.

was not otherwise directly involved in the design, analysis or writing of the paper, and she (and the Centre for Girls Education more broadly) reviewed but did not influence the findings.

D.P.

spearheaded the design of the Pathways programme, and wrote the paper, which drew on his experience with girls’ programming and his knowledge of northern Nigeria.

He was otherwise not directly involved in the data analysis.

Correspondence to Isabelle Cohen .

I.C.

declares no competing interests.

M.A.

is an employee of the Centre for Girls Education.

D.P.

has consulted for the Centre for Girls Education and served as its first director until 2016.

Nature thanks Paula González, Margaret E.

Greene and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables
The Theory of Change of the Pathways to Choice Programme as described by the Centre for Girls’ Education.

Extended Data Fig.

2 Assessing Enumerator Demand.

Extended Data Fig.

3 Treatment Effects by Age.

This figure presents rates of remaining unmarried among adolescent girls measured two years after programme start.

Girls are pooled by baseline age within treatment and control communities.

The analysis includes the 1,051 girls who answered questions on marital status during the study endline and reported being between ages 11 and 16 at baseline; it excludes five girls who reported being age 17 at baseline.

Data are presented as mean +/− s.e.m.

Extended Data Table 1 Effect of Pathways on Marital Status Full size table
Extended Data Table 2 Effects on Educational, Social and Attitudinal Outcomes Full size table
Extended Data Table 3 Effects on Younger Siblings’ Schooling Full size table
Extended Data Table 4 Balance Table Full size table
Extended Data Table 5 Marital Status Prediction by Imbalanced Covariates Full size table
Extended Data Table 6 Effect Heterogeneity on Marital Status Full size table
Extended Data Table 7 Mediated Effects of Pathways Full size table
Extended Data Table 8 Effects by Community Heterogeneity Full size table
Supplementary Information (download PDF )
Supplementary Fig.

1 and Tables 1 and 2.

Reporting Summary (download PDF )
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Version of record : 11 March 2026
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10206-2