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 system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
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/...
The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...
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_ine...
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.
Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive. We have excellent data on this.
Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.
https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...
Even if true, your "leading cause of death" statement is meaningless as young women are not generally going to die from any other cause. If you "solve" teenage pregnancy, it might well become swallowing food without chewing.
I bet pregnancy is not the "leading cause of death" among 80yo women. That must be the best age to start having children.
Anyways, I couldn't find the reference to your statement by following the link but I found that risk of pre–eclampsia(only clearly stated risk to the mother) and lower birth weight is higher than in 20–24 —no mention of other age ranges.
The report mentions that adolescent childbirth is correlated with low socio–economic status and education. Did they control for that when doing the risk assessment? It is not clear.
No mention of genetic risk to the offspring. No mention of the lives of the offspring that were "terminated" in the making of the non–pregnancy statistics.
Just some vague "abuse" statements that do not include figures for abuse of non–female young people.
WHO, indeed.
I also was curious about this so I did some research.
It looks like age 20 to 34 has the lowest mortality rate. Older or younger than that has higher mortality.
And since 14 to 18 as a cohort are all minors, it’s completely reasonable that parents and society in general discourages this activity.
Taking risks at 35 and 14 are treated differently.
Understandably so.
But what about 18 and 33?
Beyond rare risk of death to the mother, I think the health of the child to be born and the potential for younger siblings is an important consideration since we are talking about reproduction.
In Europe, marriage and pregnancies below 18 were rare and people did use to average 21 before "female education" as well but other cultures differed and differ and I don't know to what extent it is appropriate to have "global" organizations mess with their reproductive lives from a Western perspective whether it has 1820s views or 2020s views.
I picked 14 and 35 for good reason. Both have a higher chance of mortality in pregnancy as a cohort.
Also 14 is relevant for the child marriage article, which is the current context.
18 year olds are not relevant to child marriage.
They are included in the statistics for "high risk" adolescent pregnancy in gp's reference which I take as a condemnation of both adult and minor teenage pregnancies and pregnancies in general.
It's clear to you but that's still a value judgement. It's not as clear if you discount female autonomy.
The mother and baby are more likely to die. I don't think wanting to prevent that is a value judgement.
Death being bad is a value judgement.
No of course it isn't nobody suggested it was.
The value judgement is saying the changes you want are worth doing because they might reduce it. Social and personal choices are weighed all the time that include risks to lives, suggesting something that might reduce risk does not end the debate.
We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.
> We would generally want to prevent people dying in horrible aviation disasters too, we could do that by ceasing non essential air travel.
Equating educating girls to an aviation disaster has to be a new low.
This inflammatory comparison does nothing to improve the level of civil dialog on HN.
Argument by absurdity is a well known and to some well regarded rhetorical technique.
It makes you at least agree that there is a line somewhere, and then you can go on to decide where to draw it.
> Equating educating girls to an aviation disaster
To be clear, that is an unfounded accusation that you just now fabricated.
> This inflammatory comparison does nothing to improve the level of civil dialog on HN.
Your disgusting lies and fake pearl clutching are the problem here.
I take your meaning but I don't agree it is only a value judgement. It is also an evolutionary and social force.
If the value that the “other side” is espousing is that “it’s okay for girls to die giving birth”, well, we can safely discount that as a valid position to hold in modern society.
Some things are just absolutely bad.
I believe nothing is *absolutely bad* in modern society.
For example, the best way to stop pregnancy-related deaths is to forcely termination any high-risk pregnancy regardless of the pregnant woman's own wishes. But seems no one would agree.
Karma 1 account posting very inflammatory content?
I completely agree, but there's a decent chunk of people out there who don't.
When I looked up causes of death in Nigeria, malaria blew away anything maternal related[]. Not that I would want to die of either.
Another big one was HIV/AIDS. I guess it depends on cultural factors whether early marriage might reduce the number of partners that could introduce HIV/aids. If non-married people are less monogamous it's conceivable the increased risk of HIV/AIDS could overpower the risks of whatever additional childbirth is associated with marriage.
Also note pollution was one of the bigger risks present in Nigeria. So as people get educated to go slave away in a dirty factory (or a city full of them where educated people work) it might actually be worse for their health than staying at home and marrying into some pastoral herding tribe or something.
[] https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria
And more roads means more pollution. It is questionable if the answer is “make everyone dependent on cars”, although doing so obviously improves some outcomes.
Lets stop pretending there is an agreement that pain or harm to girls matters.
Sure, but this provides an argument for postponing marriage (and educating women) at least a little even if you want to coldly maximize birthrate with no regards to their feelings.
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.
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Have you asked the women and girls in those societies if they think it’s racist and disgusting?
Counter point...have you seen the rates a females on anti-anxiety / anti-depression medication in our culture?
I'm not a moral relativist, but I'm not sure we've perfected things here either.
Consider the level of access girls and women in poorer countries have to psychological assessment and medication compared to ours.
This narrative gets thrown around a lot by certain groups in misleading ways, and it's super annoying.
Women tend to advocate for themselves better in healthcare, especially mental healthcare. Women aren't, like, more depressed than men, they're just getting it treated.
[dead]
Have you?
No, which is why I am not making a moral judgement on it.
Well I am making a moral judgement. Declaring that other societies need fixing is racist and disgusting.
Go ask the women and girls in your society if your own society needs fixing.
The gender gap in compassion is always surprising. There is never “educate boys to fix society”. The argument is as follows: “But girls get raped, so we need to save them” “Who rapes girls?” “Boys” “What opportunities do they have?” “Drugs, army, and the street” “Wouldn’t they too deserve to be given care, notably the care that was too given to girls?” “No, [various reasons]” “But don’t you care that girls get raped by boys?” “Yes” “So what do you do?” “Take care of the girls”.
What? You think it is unfair that when boys go to school and girls don't, people target girls for help attending school? Twisted.
Males want to attract females and get married. They way they can do this is by achieving money/power. If education is profitable and possible, then executing it takes care of itself. If it's not possible, well it was a moot cause anyway unless some outsider will come in and help.
Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ... so bootstrapping is a little harder because they have intrinsic value they can fall back on (someone is going to get angry at me for saying that, but it's just the way it is). If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that. You have to get someone to come in and force enough of them to feel like they're a failure for not getting an education and then eventually they'll socially reinforce it themselves without further outside influence.
I believe this is why it's much higher yield for the enlightened outsider to come in and declare their moral and intellectual superiority and tell the females they are losers (or less happy, or less independent, whatever the politically correct terminology is used nowadays) for not getting an education, and get (read: bribe) their families to put them into it.
> Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ...
Women can pretty much do anything men can do. How is a wealthy, financially successful woman less valuable than a man?
I'll play this out...
Every human is equally valuable in the moral sense.
But value is subjective when we are talking about relationships and we can only generalize about this value.
High income women are more valuable to low income men.
High income men already have money. They value other attributes.
And this is the paradox successful women can face. Their success doesn’t attract the mates they desire, quite the opposite. And worse, they were never told that. They were told the opposite.
I've been told men are intimidated by successful women my whole life. Women aren't being tricked into having careers.
The whole framing of "women are only valuable for their personal assets" only makes sense from the perspective of a certain kind of man. My whole point is that this is entirely subjective. People talk about it like it's the natural state of things but it's a cultural belief.
Successful men are not intimidated by successful women, they just don't desire them (for their success)...in general.
The intimidation comes into play when men are put at an income disadvantage. Women also don't find men who make less than them desirable (in general). So it's a double wammy.
A single mutli-millionaire guy is not going to be impressed by a woman who works 50 hrs a week and makes $400k.
He would rather someone available to take care of his needs while he can take care of the financial needs.
This is the opposite of what successful females want.
> A single mutli-millionaire guy is not going to be impressed by a woman who works 50 hrs a week and makes $400k
Sure he's impressed.
People date/marry people from their caste/social circle. You want your partner to fit smoothly into your existing life which means having a similar upbringing and career trajectory.
The work vs take care of needs is a false dichotomy. The person that'll 'take care of your needs' is the person you are on the same page with - assuming you're looking for a long term partnership, rather than the equivalent of a prostitute.
Sounds nice, now imagine the dynamics are in rural Nigeria and 10-15% of kids shit themselves to death or die of malaria before they reach adulthood. Your parents are looking at some men and some are rich, others are thoughtful, others are both. Having a funny thoughtful man is nice but first and foremost you want good water and food so your kids aren't shitting themselves to death before they reach adulthood like what happened to 1/7th of your family. Probably going to want a man that can provide for you and buy nice clean food and one of the cleaner wells / bottled water sources more than you want someone in the same equally positioned caste that 'just gets you' or makes you laugh or whatever. Also nice if he's a bit powerful so that the next time the cattle raids happen, his 10 cousins show up with their muskets or machetes. If polygamy is allowed in this region, you might even prefer to be the second wife of that rich/powerful man over being the first wife of someone in your own caste.
The data in general shows women exhibit relative hypergamy. This makes sense as they have a higher reproductive cost and investment at the time of birth, and probably even thereafter.
> My whole point is that this is entirely subjective
No.
This 'entirely subjective' perspective only makes sense from a certain kind of human. I call them below 130 IQ human personally.
Where exactly was that stated or implied?
How do you interpret,
"Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets ..."
As in, women are valued just for having a womb. Men are not valued just for having a penis, or for having bigger muscles, or for being taller, unless they will use those assets on their person to go do something for someone else.
I do not interpret it, as you seem to, to mean, "the only valuable thing about women are their bodies." I do not see how you could come to such an interpretation, unless you are pattern matching the redpill memes you see in the other user's comment and extending that to, "(s)he must believe this, if there is anything remotely related to redpill in the comment".
Wild comment.
> If I can just marry a rich man I might be okay with that, or whoever makes the decisions for me might be okay with that
Fyi, “just marry” incorporates a lot of things would disqualify the use of the term “just”. The least of which is pregnancy and the risks thereof, especially in these poorer societies without healthcare.
You say this as if you are providing new information. I suspect >99% of the Hacker News population, including the commenter above you, already knows this.
Right, no man has ever attracted a woman by displaying pro-social attributes.
> Females are valuable just for their ... personal assets.
2018 called and they want their red pill back.
——
When’s your book coming out? I’m dying to learn more about “the way it is”.
——
P.S. I say this with full sincerity: If you are open to advice, try reading “Models: Attract Women Through Honest”. It will expand your mind.
It was recommended to me by a friend who managed to un-redpill himself.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Non-obvious for this guy me!
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.
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.
I didn't say the problem in America was high unemployment, I said the problem was:
> underemployed kids stuck with fake dreams and real loans
Please respond to the correct argument I made, not the incorrect argument you wish I had made.
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Or, potentially, you have less time to marry (among other things) when you go to school?
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.
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.
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.
> You call it greed but in a lot of these places it's necessity.
Yeah man, I told the judge the same thing on my shoplifting case.
A parent's primary motive is not to gain money, much less to gain money by exploiting their child.
> 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.
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.
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.
They nailed the plastics thing.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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)
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.
> 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
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...
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/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSA...
Yes - it's correlation from the factors you mentioned.
> 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.
Cant you still marry a child in some american states? Isn't this a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?
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/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.
It isn’t just about the letter of the law, it is also about judicial attitudes-two countries can have the same law on paper, but with radically different applications in practice, to the point that it isn’t really the same law.
Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.
But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.
I'm not from the US so excuse my ignorance, but if law says it's legal, how is it possible that the judge doesn't grant it? Wouldn't that make it illegal for the judge to do so?
The law usually says it can be done but needs permission from a judge. This is like saying that an after-school activity can be done for children but needs permission from the parent. That doesn't mean the parent must give permission.
Judges are way too busy to officiate most marriages in the US.
Basically any adult can officiate a marriage, then its just a matter of filing the right paperwork with the county clerk - that is what constitutes the legal/civil marriage in the US.
There was the famous case of the clerk in a county in Kentucky refusing to certify same-sex marriages a few years back.
There is also something called "common law" marriages where the state considers you married even if you didn't file the proper paperwork, but were co-habitating and especially if you had children. But this is a dying practice and only recognized by a few states / territories (ironically Washington D.C. is one of them ...)
The law isn't "child marriage is always legal" but "child marriage is allowed in specific cases with a judges consent" basically. They usually need to be given a reason to make an exception
not if you also condemn the American states that allow that...
Pretty much "yes" - 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.
See garciasn's sibling comment to yours.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
My intent: "it's universal" means the correlation between girls being low-value and child marriages is universal.
Your seeming reading: "it's universal" means child marriage occurs in every country...but that is a huge tactical mistake to say, because it gets in the way of us condemning countries where the problem is much worse than in ours.
My concern is for the girls, not for scoring point for condemning countries. To actually help the girls, the article seems to provide a proven solution. So let's do more of what works.
Vs. what is the track record for major non-aligned nations (like Nigeria) implementing progressive social reforms at scale, in response to moral condemnation by foreigners? That I've heard of, not good.
I agree scolding generally isn't effective, especially when the scolding party has no power to enforce rules.
At the same time, I see no reason not to make the condemnation. It's not being made to effect change, but reaffirm our own norms which, in this specific case, I believe are better, and we shouldn't avoid saying so and call that enlightened. I think it's a form of cowardice.
And in this connected age, perhaps a Nigerian girl could take some hope, or energy, or solace knowing that much of the world does think the way she is treated is wrong, and not normal, and that her intuition to that effect has grounding, despite the powerful local norms she finds herself faced with.
Yes this is the classical correlation vs causation situation.