Father of the bride, or steel magnolias? Targeting men, women or both to reduce child marriage

Abstract

Interventions that aim to change outcomes for women and children typically target women. Yet in contexts where men are the dominant decision-makers, male preferences and beliefs may remain the binding constraint. We ask -when we target men, women or both, with the same intervention in the same context -how their information and beliefs about private and social returns, versus their power to change household outcomes, trade off. We conduct a cluster-randomized control trial of an edutainment intervention aimed at delaying marriage of adolescent children in rural Pakistan. Our treatment arms target men and boys, women and girls, or both. We find that targeting men, or both genders jointly, significantly reduces child marriage of girls in targeted households. Underlying this, we show that whenever men are treated, they focus on private returns to the household; whenever women are treated, they focus on both private and social returns; and only when both genders are treated jointly, does the focus on social returns also become salient to men.

Keeping the peace whilst getting your way: Information, persuasion and intimate partner violence

“…These positive effects should both be larger than when mothers are targeted alone, where the sign of ∆(F ) is ambiguous. In this section, we present results on child marriage impacts -first published in this paper's companion paper (Cassidy et al, 2024) -that confirm these predictions.…”

“…We leverage an existing cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) in 177 villages in Sindh and Punjab Provinces in Pakistan, where an educational entertainment ("edutainment") intervention addressing child marriage was implemented in treatment villages and where, crucially, the gender of the targeted household members was randomly varied. The results of the RCT on the likelihood of household and village-level child marriages are reported in detail in (Cassidy et al, 2024). The villages were randomly assigned into four treatment groups:…”

“…The data collection for the RCT is described in full in Cassidy et al (2024). In particular, baseline data were collected in Sindh Province in July and August 2018, before the intervention was introduced in the treatment villages.…”

“…Mothers have an average age of 42, and 1.5 years of education. Cassidy et al (2024) report balance checks and attrition rates. Pre-specified village-and householdlevel variables are shown to be well-balanced across treatment arms and the control group.…”

“…The RCT leveraged in the current study is an existing multi-arm cluster-randomized edutainment intervention aimed at reducing child marriage, delivered in 177 villages across two provinces in rural Pakistan. The results of the RCT on its primary and other secondary outcomes are reported in Cassidy et al (2024). Pakistan is a context with persistent gender inequality (United Nations Development Programme, 2022), where IPV prevalence is strongly positively associated with patriarchal norms, and women's (economic) decision-making power, and negatively with women's education (Murshid and Critelli, 2020).…”