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Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on. It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support sys

• deleted 4mo ago
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• kelipso 4mo ago
  I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday. Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
  • nerdjon 4mo ago
    I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something. But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training. Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
    • colechristensen 4mo ago
      I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably". Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
      • Barbing 4mo ago
        Non-obvious for this guy me!
      • bombcar 4mo ago
        But if the issue fixed as "make it possible for girls to stay home until older" and paying the families would have had the same result as schooling, it's important to know that. Education can be a good and still not be the fundamental cause (just like going to school where they provide breakfast and lunch may be good, but the reason you grow stronger isn't the classes, it's the food).
      • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
        I'm ok with hearing "it's not this it's that" if there's an overcooked "it's not that it's this" narrative nearby, and there is: education was (and is!) aggressively pushed as a cure-all for job displacement and other ills by people doing labor arbitrage in the united states, it eventually turned out that wet sidewalks did not cause rain, and now there are a bunch of underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans and on the other side of the trade a bunch of rich boomers+billionaires whose brokerage accounts depend on continuing the hustle. Given that we have seen the exact education-cures-all narrative exploited to disastrous consequence in the United States, we should absolutely be asking the question "is education the active ingredient" to avoid exporting the same stupid mistake to others.
        • colechristensen 4mo ago
          [flagged]
        • watwut 4mo ago
          America has fairly low unemployment rates. Yes, schools are expensive and educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. But, you know, unemployment rates are the worst for people with low or no education.
          • smallmancontrov 4mo ago
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  • lotsofpulp 4mo ago
    > Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education. The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.
    • shermantanktop 4mo ago
      Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women. That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
      • tolerance 4mo ago
        I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.
        • stickfigure 4mo ago
          They nailed the plastics thing.
    • fsckboy 4mo ago
      I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation. the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
    • Barbing 4mo ago
      Can offer one read: > Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education. “Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.” (The desires of the kid were not referenced.)
  • jstummbillig 4mo ago
    Or, potentially, you have less time to marry (among other things) when you go to school?
    • nomel 4mo ago
      No, it's not a scheduling conflict. A child getting married is entirely about if the parents choose to force that child to be married or not. They were less motivated to marry the child, if the child was going to school, because an education is an alternative path to gain moneys, which is the parents primary motive. It's interesting how disgusting greed like this is wrapped in words, like "culture" that try to make it ok. It's a repugnant behavior, which is why there was effort to correct it, and success in that is why we're reading about it here.
      • malfist 4mo ago
        A parent's primary motive is not to gain money, much less to gain money by exploiting their child.
      • dpc050505 4mo ago
        You call it greed but in a lot of these places it's necessity. Now that necessity might partially be the result of other people's greed but that's a whole other conversation about poverty.
        • peelpod 4mo ago
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      • kelipso 4mo ago
        Their motive is to provide financial and social security for their child so that their child won’t be out in the streets if something happens to them. That’s not greed. That’s normal basic universal care for offspring that all humans have.
• saidnooneever 4mo ago
  not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school. other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
  • aprilthird2021 4mo ago
    I actually knew someone who worked in rural development where this was an issue (and to his orgs credit reduced child marriage rates a lot). Both happen at the same time, it's not one causes the other or smth like that. When families struggle with money, marrying girls off reduces their costs. Married boys remain with the family and actually bring someone new into the household, increasing costs or keeping stable if the boy works. Even in cultures where women pay dowries to marry, the ROI could be worth it if you reduce household costs every year going forward and your manual labor work has little chance of growing your income significantly. Putting a kid through, even free school, costs money and at rural poverty levels in the Global South it's similar to a huge car payment one can't afford. Marrying the kids off is like ending that payment (if they go to live with another family which only girls do)
• bell-cot 4mo ago
  > Am I misunderstanding ... NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies". That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
  • bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
    Cant you still marry a child in some american states? Isn't this a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?
    • ajkjk 4mo ago
      not if you also condemn the American states that allow that...
    • garciasn 4mo ago
      Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri. In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#compare https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.
    • bell-cot 4mo ago
      Pretty much "yes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta... I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
      • jonahx 4mo ago
• coryrc 4mo ago
  > simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here > Am I misunderstanding something here? "Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated. If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
  • nerdjon 4mo ago
    Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen. For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy. Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given. One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped. If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved. Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on. Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
    • coryrc 4mo ago
      > Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it. That's why there's an article, with text beyond the headline.
• alephnerd 4mo ago
  > Am I misunderstanding something here? No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria. Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2]. Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution. This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping [1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-school-kidnapping-girls.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...
• whalesalad 4mo ago
  Yes this is the classical correlation vs causation situation.
• svnt 4mo ago
  This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance. This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in. eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2019.00396/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/... The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-education-data-brief/ https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...
  • flossly 4mo ago
    Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality. https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_inequality_harms_societies https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...
    • wat10000 4mo ago
      I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
      • flossly 4mo ago
        Smaller families, better education level of the next gen, ... But yeah, if you are afraid of a war you want your group to be big, uneducated, easy to manipulate and expendable.
      • svnt 4mo ago
• philipallstar 4mo ago
  Yes - it's correlation from the factors you mentioned.
• rrr_oh_man 4mo ago
  Reminds me of a uni project I did. Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0] Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance. Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name. [0] TL;DR for anyone interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSAOW41H/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSA...
• clickety_clack 4mo ago
  My thoughts exactly. I think it’s less that more years of education causes child marriages to fall, and more that changing the environment that these kids are raised in leads to more education and to fewer child marriages. You might think “why does it matter?”, but if you’ve drawn the wrong lesson, you’re setting up millions of dollars in failed investments in just building schools and sending teachers into them, which won’t have the affect you expect, and that will fail to improve the lives you thought you would improve.