A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial for Measuring the Impact of Tipping Point - an Intervention Addressing Child Marriage in Selected District of Bangladesh

Background Worldwide, every year, an estimated 14 million girls aged under 18 are married with little or no say in the matter. Before age 15, girls are not physically or cognitively ready to make safe and consensual decisions about marriage, sexual relations, or reproduction. In middle adolescence (15 to 17 years), physical and cognitive readiness still varies widely, depending on the onset and pace of puberty, cognitive maturation, and the risks and responsibilities encountered at the time of marriage and childbearing . Marrying while physically and cognitively immature may limit a girl's educational opportunities, her social and emotional development, and her health and that of her children. Women who marry in childhood more often are underweight, report unintended pregnancy, experience obstetric complications and maternal death, have preterm or low birth weight births, and exhibit postnatal depression . These girls are more vulnerable to spousal physical violence. It is imperative to ensure human rights, development, health and well-being not only for the girls', but also for generations to come by addressing child marriage.

In South Asia, child marriage rates vary considerably. The rate of child marriage is highest in Bangladesh followed by Nepal. The percentage of girls marrying before age 18 and before age 15 in Bangladesh were 598.6 and 22.4 respectively and in Nepal the percentages were 4039.5 and 7.0 respectively . As elsewhere, the drivers include deeply entrenched cultural and religious beliefs, worries about family reputation and the opinion of others, dowry, poverty, parents' desires to secure economic well-being for their daughters and a perceived need to protect girls from harm, like sexual harassment and abuse. Pervasive fears of natural disasters also deepen communities' poverty and render them more vulnerable to practicing child marriage .

Preventing child marriage has been a global agenda and one of the major goals of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development goals (SDGs). In line with MDGs and SDGs Governments, Non-government organizations (NGOs) and research organizations in different countries have attempted to tackle child marriage through different programs. Most of the interventions included girls' education, livelihoods/conditional cash transfer, empowerment, and community mobilization . Unfortunately, the majority of these interventions have not been evaluated rigorously . This results in missed opportunity to learn what actually works in reducing child marriage and what does not.

Although the body of evidence on how to prevent child marriage is growing, its rate did not decline at a desirable pace. Previous interventions targeted many of the root causes of child marriage. However, despite wide recognition of the need to change pro-child marriage social norms attempt to study the impact of social norms change in addressing child marriage was rarely investigated or investigated well. Lack of understanding of social norms and how to change them effectively impedes development of effective and sustainable child marriage prevention programs. Moreover, for most of the interventions, there was a not a rigorous evaluation . Again, the interventions that had strong evaluation design did not necessarily focus on social norms change .

At this backdrop the current research proposes to conduct a cluster randomized controlled trial (CRCT) to evaluate Tipping Point (TP), an intervention to address child marriage in Bangladesh using intervention packages that differ only in terms of the intensity of the social norms change component.