The adverse effect of child marriage on women’s economic well being in Bangladesh – can microfinance help?

This paper examines the impact of child marriage on women’s economic well being using cross sectional data from Bangladesh. Child marriage is a serious social problem in itself but it can also exacerbate the prevalence of domestic violence and undermine the empowerment of women. As such, policy makers are faced with the daunting task of tackling these three issues that are intricately interrelated. This study constructs two separate indices, one for domestic violence and another for economic empowerment, to examine how they are affected by child marriage. Using probit regression models, we obtained parameter estimates that were adjusted for cluster-level correlation and unobserved heterogeneity. Domestic Violence is defined as a dummy variable, which is equal to 1, if the woman has been ever subjected to domestic violence and 0 otherwise. The empirical results show that child marriage, greater age difference between husband and wife, and poverty contribute to an increase in the incidence of domestic violence toward women, whereas both secondary and higher education result in lowering domestic violence. The variable empowerment was constructed based on aggregating a woman’s response to five questions pertaining to women’s participation in household decision-making–(i) who controls the earnings generated by the woman; (ii) who makes decisions regarding healthcare; (iii) who makes decisions on large household purchases; (iv) who makes decisions on small household purchases; and (v) whether a woman is able to visit her family and relatives. The empowerment dummy variable takes the value 1, if the woman had some role in the decision making in at least one of the five categories and 0, if she had no role in household decision making. The results of the study show that women who get married during their adolescent years are subject to increased domestic violence and are less likely to be empowered. Not surprisingly, results also show that higher educated women are more empowered than women who have primary and secondary education. Finally, using data from three microfinance institutions in Bangladesh - Grameen Bank, BRAC, and ASA, the study investigates the role of microfinance with respect to empowerment of women. Findings of the study show that while access to microcredit enhances women’s empowerment in general, this result does not hold for women who underwent child marriage. The results are similar to earlier findings which show that access to microcredit can empower women, however, unlike previous literature, this study finds that credit has no effect on the incidence of domestic violence. The policy implications of the findings of the study underscore the importance of stricter enforcement on the prohibition of child marriage and overall benefit of female higher education.