Elsevier

World Development

Volume 138, February 2021, 105226
World Development

Parents’ assets and child marriage: Are mother’s assets more protective than father’s assets?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105226Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The determinants of child marriage are not well understood.

  • Poverty is considered a driver of child marriage but empirical evidence is limited.

  • Maternal assets were associated with lower rate of girls’ child marriage in Ethiopia.

  • Paternal assets had no association or a positive association with child marriage.

  • Suggests that the impact of assets depends on the gender of the parent.

Abstract

Child marriage places girls at an increased risk for dropping out of school early, sexually transmitted infections, teenage childbirth, and accompanying childbirth complications, including maternal mortality. The determinants of child marriage are not clearly understood, which hinders efforts to mount effective interventions. This study examined the link between economic resources and child marriage by investigating whether maternal and paternal asset ownership were longitudinally associated with daughters’ child marriage in Ethiopia. Drawing upon household bargaining theory, it was hypothesized that maternal assets would be more protective of daughters’ child marriage than paternal assets. Data for 4293 girls from the nationally representative Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey, fielded in 2011 and 2014, were employed. Logistic regression and instrumental variable analyses were used to examine the relationship between transition into child marriage during the study period and maternal and paternal assets, controlling for child-, family-, and community-level characteristics. Results show that a one standard deviation increase in mother’s assets was associated with 37–53% lower odds of daughter’s child marriage whereas a one standard deviation increase in paternal asset holdings was associated with 0–37% higher odds of daughter’s child marriage. Effects were strongest in regions where the dominant mode of marriage payments is bride price. These results suggest that the link between economic resources and child marriage depends on the gender of the parent who owns the resources. This study also highlights the interconnectedness of two targets of the gender equality Sustainable Development Goal—improvement of women’s ownership of assets and the elimination of child marriage—and suggests that the realization of one gender equality target could have implications for other targets.

Introduction

Child marriage is a significant challenge facing girls. Although most of the 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 (Loaiza & Wong, 2012). Child brides are at an increased risk of dropping out of school early, poverty, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, domestic violence, teenage childbirth, and accompanying childbirth complications, including low birth weight babies, obstetric fistulae, and maternal mortality (Clark, 2004, Delprato et al., 2017, Hampton, 2010, Nour, 2006, Raj, 2010, Raj & Boehmer, 2013, Raj, Saggurti, Lawrence, Balaiah, & Silverman, 2010, Yount et al., 2018). The costs of foregone economic activity due to reduced labor force participation and lifetime earnings of child brides are borne most acutely by the girls who marry early and their families; but the costs to society are also high (Parsons et al., 2015, Wodon et al., 2017, Yount et al., 2018). The number of new child brides each year is projected to continue increasing, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where the number of women married as children is expected to double by 2050 because of the persistence of the practice and population growth (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2014). Efforts to address child marriage have achieved mixed results indicating that more insight is needed to inform the development of effective interventions (Lee-Rife et al., 2012, Stark et al., 2018).

Conventional wisdom holds that poverty is a driver of child marriage (Jain and Kurz, 2007, Nour, 2009, Otoo-Oyortey and Pobi, 2003, Vogelstein, 2013). Analysis using data from Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in developing countries showed that women aged 20–24 in the poorest households were more likely to have been married by age 18 than those in wealthiest households in all 38 countries examined except in the Philippines where there was no difference in the proportion married as children (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2006). However, these associations observed in the Demographic and Health Surveys and other cross-sectional surveys are not designed to be interpreted causally. Cross-sectional data capture information on marital status and household wealth simultaneously and therefore the observed association between wealth and child marriage may reflect the effect of child marriage on wealth (Nayak, 2013). Research using longitudinal data can address this reverse causality concern. A related issue is that most datasets used in previous research do not have information on the wealth of the natal family of married respondents. In patrilocal societies, household wealth for married girls/women will refer to the wealth of the new union or the husband’s natal family depending on whether married couples form new households or join the husband’s, whereas household wealth for unmarried girls will likely refer to the wealth of the girls’ natal family. Such systematic differences in the household unit whose wealth is being measured will lead to biased estimates. Addressing this concern requires data on natal family wealth for both married and unmarried girls.

An additional limitation of previous observational studies is that the association between wealth and child marriage may be confounded by other factors such as social class, kinship ties, upbringing, agency, aversion to risk, and other psychological traits and social differentiators, which are difficult to control. Thus, an association between wealth and child marriage might not reflect a causal relation.

An aspect of the relationship between wealth and child marriage that has not been examined is whether the relationship depends on the gender of the parent who holds the wealth. A small but growing literature has examined the relationship between women’s asset holdings and family decision making and finds that in families where women own valuable assets, compared to families where women do not, women are more likely to be involved in family decisions in India (Garikipati, 2009) and Peru (Wiig, 2013), and more likely to have final say over family decisions in Nepal (Allendorf, 2007, Mishra and Sam, 2016, Pandey, 2010). These findings suggest that if individual family members have different preferences concerning child marriage, e.g., the father prefers the daughter’s child marriage but the mother does not, then the balance of wealth in the family may influence who will have more say, i.e., whether the daughter is married off early. However, limited availability of sex-disaggregated data on asset ownership has impeded research on the gendered effects of wealth (Rodgers & Kassens, 2018).

I examined the relationship between parents’ assets and risk of child marriage using the 2011–2012 and 2013–2014 longitudinal waves of the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey. A unique aspect of this study is that I used data on individual asset holdings of each parent to study whether the relationship differed between maternal and paternal assets. Additionally, the study used a consistent operational definition of wealth (i.e., natal family wealth) regardless of the final marital status of the girls in the sample. Further, the analyses included area-level fixed effects which controlled for geographic differences between wealthy and poor families that may confound the relationship between economic status and child marriage (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2006). I addressed a criticism of past research by using an instrumental variables econometric approach to minimize bias arising from unmeasured confounding. The study also took advantage of the cultural diversity of Ethiopia by examining whether the nature of payments at marriage (i.e., bride price versus dowry) that is customary modified the relationship between assets and child marriage.

Section snippets

Conceptual framework

Who it is that owns assets in a family may influence family decisions, such as whether a daughter is married off early. Such within-family dynamics are formalized in the collective model of Chiappori (1992). According to the model, each individual in the family has his or her own preferences, which are described over the individual’s own consumption as well as the consumption of other family members. For example, if the marriage of a daughter raises a man’s social status then a girl’s marriage

Prevalence of child marriage in Ethiopia

Ethiopia is an appropriate context for this study because it has poverty and child marriage rates that are among the world’s highest (United Nations Children's Fund, 2019, World Bank, 2019). The Ethiopian government has undertaken efforts to eradicate child marriage. For instance, the minimum age of marriage for females was raised to 18 years in 2000, and in 2005 the criminal code criminalized child marriage (The Revised Family Code, 2000). However, child marriage persists. Data from the 2016

Data

I used longitudinal data from two waves of the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (ESS) that were collected in 2011–2012 and 2013–2014 (Agency, 2014, Agency, 2018). The ESS was a collaborative project between the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia and the World Bank. It was designed to be representative of rural and small town (i.e., towns with populations of <10,000) areas. In the first wave, 3,969 households were interviewed yielding a response rate of 99.3%. Of these households, 95% were

Descriptive analysis

In descriptive analysis, I used the period life table method to compare probability of marriage across age groups and estimate median age at marriage for girls, stratified by whether the mother was in the top quartile or in the bottom quartile of the asset distribution. A period life table presents what would happen to a hypothetical cohort if it experienced the age-specific transitions into marriage of the girls in the sample.

Logistic regression analysis

The main analysis examined the relationship between girls’ risk for

Descriptive results

Table 1 summarizes information on asset ownership of mothers and fathers. There were low ownership rates for the majority of asset types, which suggests a high prevalence of poverty in the sample. The most commonly owned asset was a blanket, which 63% of mothers and 83% of fathers owned. Electric ovens and cars were the least commonly held assets by mothers and fathers. On average, mothers owned about half (51.8%) as many asset types as fathers. Mothers were less likely to own most asset types

Discussion

This study shows that the link between parent’s assets and daughter’s child marriage in Ethiopia depends on the gender of the parent. In particular, mother’s asset holdings were associated with lower likelihood of child marriage whereas father’s asset holdings either had no association or a positive association with child marriage. The association between mother’s assets and child marriage was in the opposite direction of that between father’s assets and child marriage. Further, the opposing

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Felix M. Muchomba: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The author declares that he has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges funding from the Rutgers University Research Council, United States.

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