Is Parental Asset Ownership Associated with Daughters' Child Marriage? a Secondary Analysis of Longitudinal Data from Ethiopia

Background and Purpose: Child marriage is a form of child abuse that places girls at an increased risk for sexually transmitted infections, domestic violence, marital instability, school termination, teenage childbirth, and accompanying childbirth complications including maternal death. Although most of the estimated 14 million girls who are married before age 18 each year are in developing countries, there are child brides in every region of the world. Consequently, there is growing consensus among social workers, policymakers, and children’s welfare advocates in both developing and developed nations on the need to address child marriage. However, the determinants of child marriage are not clearly understood which hinders efforts to mount effective interventions. This study examines the link between economic resources and child marriage by investigating whether maternal and paternal asset ownership are independently and longitudinally associated with daughters’ child marriage in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage, with an estimated 14% of girls married by the age of 15 and 40% by the age of 18 years. Drawing upon household bargaining theory, we hypothesized that few maternal assets would be a stronger predictor of daughters’ child marriage than few paternal assets.

Methods: We used panel data for 2,776 families with at least one daughter aged 6–17, from the nationally-representative Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey, fielded in 2011 (wave 1) and 2014 (wave 2). The dependent variable was whether a girl became a child bride between the two waves. The first wave collected data on how many assets each household owned, and who in the household owned the item, from a list of 35 different common assets, including farm implements, furniture, home appliances, vehicles, etc., which we used to construct the two main independent variables—number of maternal and paternal assets. Multivariate probit analysis examined the relationship between daughters’ child marriage, baseline maternal assets, and baseline paternal assets, controlling for daughter- and family-level demographic characteristics.

Results: Overall incidence [95% confidence interval] of child marriage was 27.4 [21.4–33.4] per thousand per year. Incidence of child marriage increased with age, from no child marriage among 6-year-olds to 127.9 [59.5–196.4] among 17-year-olds. Each additional maternal asset was associated with a 4.3 [0.7–7.8] percentage point lower likelihood of daughter’s child marriage. Paternal asset ownership was not associated with child marriage (p=0.17).

Conclusions and Implications:  Results suggest that the link between parental assets and child marriage depends on the gender of the parent. Mothers’ increased access and control over resources may give them the security to delay their daughters’ marriages. Therefore, ongoing efforts of social workers, policymakers, and children’s welfare advocates to address child marriage should consider developing and testing asset building interventions for mothers of girls.