Developing Youth Groups in Bangladesh to Support Peers at Risk of Early Marriage

The intervention aims to empower youth groups (including both girls and boys in the age range 16-25) to tackle the problem of female early marriage within their communities through paralegal training and mentoring and supervision by experienced paralegals. The aim of the intervention is to reduce female early marriage and school dropout, and improve agency of adolescent girls and young women in Bangladesh.

The intervention involves three key steps: (i) mobilisation/sensitisation (ii) selection and (iii) capability development.

1. Mobilisation & Sensitisation: A campaign led by BLAST together with community-based organisations to improve community awareness – among parents, community leaders, youth – about the legal rights of, and remedies for, children and adolescents in relation to early marriage; the duties of parents, guardians and the community to prevent the practice; and harmful effects of the practice;

2. Selection: Identifying, through the campaign, youths motivated to continue working on awareness within their communities; and providing them logistical support to self-organise into groups;

3. Capability Development: Provide training to these youth groups on organising activities within their communities to change perceptions about early marriage and the potential of adolescent girls. This will include

a) leadership and negotiation training;
b) local community advocacy training; setting up an advisory committee consisting of school teachers, female entrepreneurs and other key stakeholders to advise on activities, and provide a link to schools and local service providers (e.g. police, marriage registrars, etc.);
c) paralegal training; pairing with experienced paralegals who can advise and serve as mentors;
d) social media training to create a digital network connecting youth groups across communities, and enabling them to connect with vulnerable individuals (i.e. those at risk of early marriage or other forms of coercion) within their communities;
e) training on using helplines to connect with relevant service providers to aid vulnerable individuals, such as BLAST’s helpline for providing legal advice; and the Bangladesh government national helpline (109) and mobile app (JOY) for reporting on violence against women, early marriage and other forms of coercion;
f) establishing youth clubs that organise activities aimed at producing sustained changes in perceptions of adolescent girls and young women (for example, sporting events, theatrical performances, self-protection from cyber-bullying/online harassment, film-making and computer programming).

2023-06-01

2025-06-01

schooling, marriage and childbirth

School enrolment, marital status, childbirth and related information will be self-reported by the intended programme beneficiaries and their guardians during the baseline and endline surveys.

aspirations

Data collection on aspirations will be based on survey questions the achievements along various dimensions (e.g. education, employment marriage, children) that respondents believe it is important for a young woman to “get by” and “live well”.

We will identify 100 urban wards across four districts for inclusion in the study. 50 of these will be randomly assigned to the treatment arm and the remaining 50 will be assigned to the control arm.

We will use a two-stage sample design. In the first-phase, we will identify 100 urban wards for inclusion in the study (50 of which will be randomly assigned to the treatment group and 50 to the control group), and a low-income neighbourhood within the ward covering an area of about 600 households.

In the second-phase, we will divide each of these 100 neighbourhoods into three, each covering approximately 200 households, and randomly choose one of them for the household census. Thus, the household census will be conducted in 100 ‘sub-neighbourhoods’, each with a population of about 200 households.

The purpose of the census will be to identify all households in the ‘sub-neighbourhood’ with adolescent girls and young women aged 13-25 years.

Based on the household census, 40 households will be selected from each ward for the baseline survey using stratified random sampling. Specifically, the sample will include 30 households with adolescent girls aged 13-17 years, and 10 additional households with young women aged 18-25 years (the demographic groups defined as targeted beneficiaries for the proposed intervention).

The randomisation of treatment across the study neighbourhoods will be conducted by the Principal Investigator using computer software (STATA's built-in randomisation functions).

The unit of randomisation is an urban 'ward', the smallest administrative unit in urban Bangladesh.

Yes

The intervention will be conducted in low-income urban neighbourhoods, each covering an area of about 600 households, in 50 wards in four districts of Bangladesh: Dinajpur (15 wards), Dhaka (15 wards), Khulna (10 wards), Patuakhali (10 wards) (a ‘ward’ is the smallest administrative unit in urban areas of Bangladesh). 50 additional wards from the same districts will also be included in the study as controls.

The study sample will consist of 4,000 households (40 households per community x 100 communities). Using the stratified random sampling described above, we anticipate that the sample will include approximately 3,500 adolescent girls and 1,800 young women.

50 treatment clusters and 50 control clusters. Each cluster is a neighbourhood within an urban 'ward', the smallest administrative unit in urban Bangladesh.

We have conducted power calculations for the key outcome variables which are shown in Figure 2 in the Analysis Plan. The figure shows the required number of treatment clusters for various effect sizes for two key outcome variables (i) probability of marriage below 18 at the end of the intervention period – 2 years – for girls aged 13-17 years at baseline; (ii) total years of schooling at the end of the intervention period for girls aged 13-17 years at baseline. For these calculations we use alpha = 0.05, power = 0.80, equal number of clusters in treatment and control arms, and obtain the intra-cluster correlations and estimates of variance from the 2014 WiLCAS (rho = 0.053 for years of schooling, and rho = 0 for probability of marriage below 18; sd = 2.4 for years of schooling). In the figure, we also show the power calculations for two alternative scenarios: (a) rho = ICC in 2014 WiLCAS + 0.01; (b) rho = ICC in 2014 WiLCAS + 0.02. As the figures show, for all scenarios considered, 50 treatment clusters are sufficient to detect an effect size of a decrease in the rate of early marriage by 0.06% points or more; and an increase in schooling by 0.045 years or more, at the 5% significance level.