Associations between early marriage, women's empowerment, and infant mortality in SubSaharan Africa

Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is characterized by high gender inequality and a high rate of early marriages of girl children, which could have a negative influence on child health outcomes and child mortality in the region. This study examined the influence of child marriage on infant mortality in selected countries in SSA. We used Cox proportional hazard models to analyze pooled data ( N=33,549 children) from the Demographic and Health Surveys of 28 SSA countries. Our study established that children of child brides faced heightened risks of infant mortality compared with children of women who married after the age of 18, although this relationship became insignificant after controlling for women's empowerment and other control variables. Therefore, the findings support the hypothesis that a certain extent of women's empowerment could moderate the relationship between early marriage and infant mortality in regions where early marriages occur due to the low socioeconomic status of women. We conclude that ensuring women empowerment and increasing their economic opportunities (such as involvement in the agriculture and formal employment sectors) will lead to decreases in child marriage, thereby reducing infant mortality in SSA.

Keywords

Child marriage / Child mortality / Infant mortality / Women's empowerment / Sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the DHS Program for permission to use datasets of the selected countries.

Funding

None.

Conflict of interest

Authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Author contributions

Conceptualization: Sunday A. Adedini

Methodology: Sunday A. Adedini, Kazeem Adebayo Sunmola, Adesoji Dunsin Ogunsakin

Formal analysis: Sunday A. Adedini, Sunday Matthew Abatan, Kazeem Adebayo Sunmola

Writing - original draft: All authors

Writing - review & editing: Sunday A. Adedini

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This study utilized secondary data from DHS with all identifier information removed. The MEASURE Demographic and Health Surveys project was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Inner City Fund (ICF), United States. All study participants gave written informed consent and the projects were implemented following relevant guidelines and regulations.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Availability of data

Datasets for this study were obtained from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) program. These are publicly available data that can be accessed on request at https://dhsprogram.com/Data/.

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