Bring back married adolescent girls to schools
Imagine a future where thousands of girls, married off too young, find their way back to classrooms. This vision is not just aspirational—it's essential. According to the Socioeconomic and Demographic Survey 2023 published by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), marriage accounts for 42 percent of student dropouts. Shockingly, 71 percent of female dropouts cite marriage as the cause, compared to three percent of boys. Girls who leave school due to marriage not only lose educational opportunities but also have lower chances of joining the formal labour market. As adults, they face lifelong economic insecurity and social marginalisation.
Last year, a BRAC survey of 50,000 households in the country, titled "Born to be a Bride," found that child marriage is happening in both poor and rich families. In addition to poverty and lack of social safety for girls, parents mentioned finding a "suitable groom" as one of the main reasons for arranging marriage for their daughters. Weak law enforcement is also responsible for child marriage. Alarmingly, around one and a half years of Covid pandemic-induced school closures exacerbated the situation, with poverty pushing more families towards child marriage.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. Child marriage is a violation of children's rights and a form of sexual violence. Adolescent brides face heightened health risks, increased domestic violence, and the abrupt end of their childhood. Sadly, Bangladesh has the highest child marriage rate in South Asia. According to Bangladesh Sample Vital Statistics 2023, 41.06 percent of girls under 18 years of age were married last year, a significant rise from 31.3 percent in 2020. This regression is not just disappointing, it's unacceptable.
The dropout statistics are equally bleak. While secondary school enrolment for girls has risen to 83.7 percent, 34.87 percent still drop out, with the majority leaving after primary school (Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics, 2023).
Married adolescents often face discriminatory attitudes from teachers, administrators and other students. It is considered inappropriate to have a married or pregnant girl in the classroom as she is perceived as setting a "bad example" to other students. Besides, caregiving responsibilities prevent most married girls from continuing their education when they become mothers. They face various challenges after childbirth, which include a lack of affordable childcare, and an inflexible school routine for new mothers. Furthermore, their families, often poor, do not encourage or support their studies. Marriage and motherhood are frequently perceived as incompatible with schooling in Bangladesh, which needs to change.
While there are some efforts to prevent child marriage, hardly any organisation focuses on bringing back married adolescents to schools. They remain almost invisible in our development discourse. But there are programmes in other countries that address the multiple needs of adolescent mothers and build their agency for future planning.
The Reencontrandome (Finding myself again) programme in Mexico used a multipronged approach to build support networks for adolescent mothers, run workshops to enhance their skills and agency for returning to school, and gain employment. The programme taught about sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), trained SRHR care providers for providing support to adolescents, monitored the availability of contraception, identified cases of sexual violence, and referred girls to appropriate services.
By the end of the programme, significant improvements were observed: a 30 percent increase in the use of contraception among girls; a 33 percent increase in girls communicating assertively with their partners; a 40 percent increase in girls attending school or being in paid work; a nearly 70 percent increase in girls having a reliable support network.
In Bangladesh, we should integrate policies to support married girls and adolescent mothers into existing national strategies for education, child marriage and adolescent health. Referral and tracking mechanisms should be created between health, education and child protection systems to identify pregnant adolescents in school and refer them to appropriate maternal health and child protection services. A system to track adolescent girls who have left school due to marriage or pregnancy can be developed to actively reach out to girls after their childbirth and facilitate their reintegration into school.
Moreover, parents, in-laws and community members should be made aware of the importance of education for married girls. Teachers, school staff and students need to be sensitised on the rights of married girls to help them complete their education free from stigma. Finally, married girls should be supported in balancing their caring responsibilities and studies by establishing childcare facilities near schools or offering adolescent mothers flexible school hours.
Girls married too young are more than statistics—they are individuals with dreams deferred. It's time we acknowledged their plight and prioritise their right to education. Our society must rise to this challenge and ensure that marriage is not the end of a girl's journey, but a chapter she can rewrite with dignity and hope.
Laila Khondkar is an international development worker.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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