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00:38 My name is Dr. Zaki Wahad and I'm a reader in economics at the University of Kent.
00:43 Since I arrived at the University of Kent in 2012, I have been doing work on child marriage.
00:49 This is an important issue in developing countries around the world.
00:53 About one in three women in developing countries experience marriage below the age of 18.
00:59 And this can have wide-ranging adverse consequences for themselves in terms of their education,
01:04 their future life outcomes, but also for their families and for the wider community.
01:10 He's part of a team trying to find out why this is happening and the consequences.
01:15 The aim is to end child marriage.
01:19 In many of these countries we find evidence that the older a bride is,
01:23 the higher is the dowry that her parents are required to pay.
01:27 And that is a strong economic driver for early marriage.
01:31 Girls are much more likely to drop out of school as a result of early marriage.
01:36 But at the same time it's important to emphasize that poverty is not the only factor.
01:41 The trends in Bangladesh, in India, in Nepal.
01:45 It's very much worth noting that culture still plays a very important influence
01:49 on marriage practices in these parts of the world.
01:52 And this culture can take the form of social pressures for early marriage.
01:57 Since 2018, Dr. Wahaj has collaborated with Mimoda Foundation,
02:03 a non-profit organization that operates a range of social development programs in northern Bangladesh.
02:10 And alongside Dr. Abu Parvez Shanchoy from Florida International University,
02:16 they designed an intervention aimed at reducing female early marriage in the region.
02:21 The intervention, informed by their previous research,
02:24 involves creating official birth records of adolescent girls
02:28 to provide them with better legal protection against early marriage.
02:37 My name is Abu Shanchoy. I'm an associate professor of economics
02:41 at Florida International University of the USA.
02:44 We took 240 villages in rural Bangladesh.
02:48 And some of the villages are randomly being chosen to receive universal birth certificate program.
02:55 Another set of group, we gave all the kids the birth certification.
03:00 Plus we gave them the helpline number.
03:03 And since we have executed the randomized control trial at the end of the study,
03:07 we can compare the rate of child marriage in those communities where nothing has been given.
03:14 And then we're going to compare that with those communities
03:17 where we have ensured universal birth registration system.
03:21 And then we also compare in the third group where we gave both.
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04:50 >> We also spoke with some other women who were a victim of child marriage like 10 years ago.
04:55 And what is their current condition?
04:57 They have low years of education.
05:00 So because of the marriage, they could not complete their schooling.
05:03 Many of these girls will become pregnant and will start bearing child at very early age of their life.
05:09 So at that time, physically and mentally, they are not mature enough to take such a big responsibility.
05:16 So that could lead to undernourished child and would lead to intergenerational poverty and intergenerational malnutrition.
05:28 So they are most likely have zero voice, zero agency,
05:33 and they do not get engaged in the household level decision making.
05:37 And this decision making could be like whether they would be able to get out of the house on their own,
05:42 whether they have any property right, how to manage their finances.
05:46 So all these things have deep consequences for the future generation.
05:51 >> The harmful effects of child marriage means that it's important to find new ways to tackle the problem.
05:58 And the research is beginning to provide some important insights that can lead to solutions.
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07:08 >> Schools are especially important to ending child marriage in Bangladesh.
07:13 By law, girls need a birth certificate to study there.
07:17 We visited a school who think education is crucial to help raise awareness.
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08:47 >> There have also been cases where fake birth registration certificates have been produced.
08:53 What a fake birth certificate means is that there is no digital presence of that record on the national database.
09:01 Part of what we have been doing is to inform families about how to register the births of their children,
09:07 particularly adolescent girls, to facilitate this process by taking them to the digital centers.
09:15 And in cases where they turn out to be fake, we are helping them to do the birth registration accurately
09:20 so that they have a genuine certificate for their adolescent daughters.
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10:48 >> We hope that the birth certificates that have been created as a result of the intervention is going to help the girls stay in school,
10:59 delay their marriage, and lead to other benefits.
11:04 We hope that the research is going to help design better programs, better interventions in rural Bangladesh
11:13 and in other developing countries with a similar setting.
11:17 It's very important to design these interventions in a culturally sensitive way so that we achieve the desired outcomes.
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