This article reviews 23 child marriage prevention programs carried out in low-income countries and employing a range of programmatic approaches and evaluation strategies. We document the types of child marriage programs that have been implemented, assess how they have been evaluated, describe the main limitations of these evaluations, summarize the evaluation results, and make recommendations to improve future prevention efforts. The evidence suggests that programs offering incentives and attempting to empower girls can be effective in preventing child marriage and can foster change relatively quickly. Methodological limitations of the reviewed studies, however, underscore that more needs to be learned about how the programs prevent child marriage and whether impact is sustained beyond program implementation.

Child marriage, defined as marriage before the age of 18 years, is a human rights violation that can have lasting adverse educational and economic impacts. The objective of this review was to identify high-quality interventions and evaluations to decease child marriage in low- and middle-income countries. PubMed, Embase, PsycInfo, CINAHL Plus, Popline, and the Cochrane Databases were searched without language limitations for articles published through November 2015. Gray literature was searched by hand. Reference tracing was used, as well as the unpacking of systematic reviews. Retained articles were those that were evaluated as having high-quality interventions and evaluations using standardized scoring. Eleven high-quality interventions and evaluations were abstracted. Six found positive results in decreasing the proportion married or increasing age at marriage, one had both positive and negative findings, and four had no statistical impact on the proportion married or age at marriage. There is wide range of high-quality, impactful interventions included in this review which can inform researchers, donors, and policy makers about where to make strategic investments to eradicate marriage, a current target of the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite the cultural factors that promote child marriage, the diversity of interventions can allow decision makers to tailor interventions to the cultural context of the target population.

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Individual and household-level characteristics that influence sexual behavior have been extensively studied in South Africa, but community characteristics have received limited attention. We use multilevel discrete time hazard models and multilevel logistic regression models to analyze data from a representative sample of young people in KwaZulu Natal, and from several sources of community data. Results suggest that, net of individual and household characteristics, higher levels of community concentrated disadvantage are associated with increased hazard of sexual initiation and higher risk of unprotected sex. Social disorder increases the hazard of sexual initiation, while greater community social cohesion is associated with delayed sexual debut, although the latter association appears stronger for young men than for young women. We discuss these results and the ways they vary from predictions based on US. theory in light of conditions prevailing in contemporary South Africa.

This article examines the determinants of contraceptive and abortion behavior and how each of these influences the other, with an emphasis on the role of women's life-course stage and experience. We base our approach on life-course theory, which argues that behavior is influenced by current circumstances as well as experiences over the life course. We use data collected for every pregnancy experienced by 2,444 women in Madhya Pradesh, India, to explore use of temporary contraceptive methods (both modern and traditional) and sterilization, as well as abortion attempts. We use logistic regression to model whether women took these actions in a given pregnancy interval, including past experience with contraception in the abortion analyses and with abortion in the contraceptive analyses. The results suggest that life-course factors play a role in shaping behavior. Moreover, past use of contraceptives has a significant effect on attempted abortion and vice versa. Finally, we find that this relationship changes as women age and accumulate experience.