The World Problems Index

Humanitarian

← Back to the index
GlobalHumanitarianCuratedhigh confidence

Child Marriage

Twelve million girls are married before eighteen every year.

Severity score

38.0

Serious · default weighting

Trajectory

Improving

What this is

Child marriage ends education, raises maternal mortality risk and entrenches poverty across generations. Rates fall slowly and reverse during crises, when families use marriage as an economic coping strategy.

Score breakdown

Loss of life

26

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

84

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

32

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

1

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

26

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.