Pathways

Delaying Age of Marriage through Education and Vocational Training for Out-Of-School Girls in Northern Nigeria

Program at a Glance:

Where: Borno, Kaduna and Kano states in northern Nigeria 

When: 2018-2020 

Who:  Unmarried, adolescent girls aged 12-17 who are not in school

Objective:  The goal of the program is to empower girls in Nigeria’s northeastern and northwestern regions through accelerated literacy and numeracy instruction, life skills, vocational training and livelihood opportunities in order to reduce their risk of and vulnerability to child/early marriage.

Funding and Strategic Partners:  MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, OASIS, University of Washington, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of California, Berkeley, Hallmark Leadership initiative (HALI) Borno State, and Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative (IWEI) Kano State

What is Pathways to Choice?

The Pathways to Choice Program, is a community-focused intervention designed by CGE which combines academic support, vocational training, and engagement with religious and traditional leaders to enhance girls’ education and well-being, and reduce likelihood of child marriage.

Girls who are out-of-school are often the most vulnerable girls in a northern Nigerian community.  They marry at a younger age and suffer from higher rates of maternal mortality, morbidity and illiteracy.

How does it work?  

  1. First, the teams engage community and religious leaders on the importance of girls’ education.

  2. Then, all out-of-school adolescent girls from participating communities are offered accelerated learning in safe spaces in  literacy, numeracy, financial literacy and business skills). The program has an established two-year curriculum led by locally recruited mentors

  3. At the end of the first year, girls are invited to enroll in school for one additional year of support. Those who are not interested in reentry are invited to join vocational training at no cost to them or their families.

“Some people saw me as someone who didn’t know what he was doing. They thought that I should marry my daughter off rather than keeping her in school. They said the program is not religiously acceptable. But our religion isn’t like that. Islam does not disallow a child from getting an education. ... Now even [the Imam] has two of his daughters in the Program.”  - Father of a (pilot) participant (Perlman et al., 2017)

The Pathways Evaluation

Dr. Isabelle Cohen of the University of Washington led a paired cluster-randomized control trial in 18 communities that tested the effects of Pathways on adolescent girls in the states of Borno, Kaduna and Kano, with a total sample of 1,181 girls.

A big-push community intervention reduced rates of child marriage by 80% by Isabelle Cohen, Maryam Abubakar & Daniel Perlman. Nature: 2026

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Key Results from Pathways

  • Pathways decreases rates of marriage among adolescent girls from 86% in the control group to only 21% in the treatment group—a decrease of just over 80%.

  • Pathways increases school attendance by 70 percentage points

  • Pathways participants’ younger siblings enrolled at school at higher rates, with an increase of 87% for sisters and 41% for brothers. 

  • Girls in the control group are likely to start bearing children earlier, attain less education, earn less income of their own, be more likely to face intimate partner violence, and have worse health than girls who received the Pathways programme

Accelerate Research Hub Study:  This study used economic modeling to estimate the potential impact of scaling up safe spaces  interventions for adolescent girls in Kano and Kaduna. See Results in this Policy Brief.