Child marriage has been shown to have negative impacts on the education, health, and psychological well-being of the girls who marry early. These negative impacts explain why in many countries child marriage has been prohibited by law, but often with little practical effect.
Building on results from the literature on poverty measurement, this paper provides new estimates of global trends in child marriage using a more precise and complete measurement approach than has been done to-date. The results suggest that while the incidence of child marriage as well as the child marriage gap and the squared child marriage gap have all been
reduced over time, this has taken place relatively slowly.