Empowering Married Adolescents

Policy Context

Child marriage remains a pervasive challenge globally, with millions of girls married before age 18 each year. In northern Nigeria, early marriage is exceptionally widespread and is associated with negative social, health, and economic outcomes for girls and their children. While most interventions aim to prevent child marriage, relatively little evidence exists on programs that support girls who are already married—an important population given the scale of the issue and the limited reach of prevention-focused programs.

One key mechanism through which child marriage shapes life trajectories is fertility: earlier marriage leads to earlier and more frequent childbearing, with substantial associated health risks. Despite promising results from recent efforts to shift norms and delay marriage, there remains a critical evidence gap on whether post-marriage interventions can increase contraceptive uptake, improve maternal and child health practices, and reduce gender-based violence among married adolescent girls.

Study Design

The intervention Safe Spaces for Married Adolescents (MAS)—implemented by the Centre for Girls Education (CGE)—provides married girls ages 14–19 with safe spaces, life skills, linkages to clinics, and access to contraceptive information. An ongoing cluster-randomized controlled trial launched in 2022 across 40 communities in Kaduna State indicates that MAS meaningfully improves girls’ well-being. Early results from the 2023 follow-up survey showed increased birth spacing and reductions in intimate partner violence.

The CEGA-funded follow-on study aimed to assess whether health facility data could complement self-reported survey data, particularly in remote settings where direct measurement of reproductive health outcomes is challenging. Between 2023 and 2024, the research team piloted several approaches to gathering data from health centers serving MAS treatment and control communities. Data collection included:

1. Surveys of 90 health center staff across 22 facilities to gather perceptions of service use, comfort with providers, and contraceptive-related interactions.
2. Digitization of community-level monthly records covering contraceptive provision and utilization from May 2022 to July 2025 (134 records total), though patient-level records did not exist in practice.

Ultimately, 38 of the original 40 communities were covered; two communities lacked accessible health center records due to the demolition of the facilities that served them.

Results and Policy Lessons

This pilot demonstrates that in low-resource settings, facility-based surveys and community-level service utilization records can meaningfully enhance impact evaluations focused on adolescent girls’ reproductive health. Findings point to MAS as a promising model for improving contraceptive uptake, birth spacing, and comfort with healthcare providers among married adolescents.

More broadly, results underscore the potential of post-marriage interventions—an area that has historically received little investment relative to prevention—to improve well-being in contexts where early marriage is prevalent and structural constraints limit girls’ autonomy.