Half of Bangladeshi women still marry as children

Introduction

In the 1994 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 73% of women aged 20–24 said they had been married before their 18th birthday, and 47% before they turned 15.¹

Three decades later, both numbers have fallen. In the 2025 survey, 47% of young women had married before 18 and 13% before 15.¹ The decline in the earliest marriages is especially striking. But Bangladesh still has the highest prevalence of child marriage in South Asia and ranks among the ten countries with the highest levels in the world.²

38 million

Women and girls in Bangladesh who were married before age 18, including 13 million married before 15, according to UNICEF.

A slow decline

The share married before 18 barely changed between 1994 and 2011, hovering between 65% and 73%. Real progress began only in the 2010s.¹ Marriages before 15 — the most harmful, because they almost always end a girl’s education — have fallen much faster, from 47% to 13%.

These figures come from different household surveys (BDHS and MICS) at irregular intervals, so small changes between individual surveys should not be over-read. The long-term direction, however, is clear.

The highest rate in South Asia

Bangladesh’s rate of 47% compares with 35% in Nepal, 22% in India and 18% in Pakistan in their latest surveys.¹ Countries with similar incomes and cultures have moved faster, which suggests the problem is not inevitable.

Why it persists

Poverty is the most commonly cited driver: marrying a daughter young can reduce the household’s costs, and dowry demands typically rise with a bride’s age. Concerns about girls’ safety and family honour, harassment on the way to school, and the economic shocks that follow floods and cyclones also push families towards early marriage.²

The law sets the minimum age of marriage at 18 for women and 21 for men. But the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 2017 includes a “special provision” allowing marriages below the minimum age in undefined special cases with the consent of parents and a court, which critics argue creates a loophole.³

The cost of marrying young

Girls who marry early are more likely to leave school, to have their first child while still adolescents, and to face complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Their children are more likely to be born underweight and to be stunted. Child marriage also reduces women’s lifetime earnings and their say in household decisions.²

Meeting the targets

The government’s National Plan of Action aims to end child marriage by 2041; the Sustainable Development Goals set a deadline of 2030. UNICEF has estimated that progress would need to be 8 times faster than in the previous decade to meet the national target, and 17 times faster to meet the SDG target.²

The approaches with the strongest evidence behind them include:

• Keeping girls in school, through stipends and free secondary education — Bangladesh’s female stipend programmes are one of the main reasons girls now outnumber boys in secondary school.
• Cash transfers and livelihood support to poor households, especially after disasters.
• Enforcing the minimum age and narrowing the “special provision” in the 2017 Act.
• Mandatory birth and marriage registration, so officials can verify ages.
• Community programmes that work with parents, religious leaders and marriage registrars to change norms.