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Abstract
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In this issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, Anju Malhotra and Shatha Elnakib have published a review titled "20 years of the evidence base on what works to prevent child marriage: A systematic review". In this commentary, we reflect on the contribution of this review to the global discourse, comment on its central question and conclusions, and reflect on the authors' interpretation of the review's conclusions and their recommendations for action and research.
We compliment the authors on their review, which represents a substantial contribution to the field of child marriage prevention. Although the review is limited to English language publications, it brings together a huge body of research by summarizing the findings from 34 publications on 30 research studies and evaluations. Its time frame covers the period from 2000 to 2019. In doing so, it covers the 15 years of the Millennium Development Goals era and the first 5 years of the Sustainable Development Goals era. It includes studies and evaluations that used a wide range of methodologies, most notably a number of more rigorous single-component and multi-arm studies completed and reported on in the last 5 years. The authors assessed the quality of the studies/evaluations and considered not only the effectiveness of interventions and intervention packages but also scale and sustainability. They deserve to be commended for their meticulous and painstaking analysis.
We believe that the central question of the review is very important: namely, what interventions and intervention packages should we--as the global community--implement at scale to achieve the ambitious goals we have set to end child marriage and most importantly what should we not invest in? In their introduction, the authors adeptly make the case for answering this question (i.e., that decision-makers at the country level and those who support them need to know what investments to make to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal target on ending child marriage), as well as why it has not yet been answered (i.e., because of a limited evidence base, descriptions and analyses that made classifying the interventions used to prevent child marriage difficulty, and little attention to scale and sustainability).
We also concur that the four central conclusions of the review appear to flow logically from the available evidence...
Language: en |