Bangladesh Must Move Beyond “Free Education” to End Child Marriage
Why ending child marriage is the only way to make educational promises meaningful
by Professor M Niaz Asadullah & Professor Zaki Wahhaj
As Bangladesh absorbs the implications of the recent general election, we have been reflecting on the conversations that shaped the campaign period. The result signals major political change, but one of our most urgent social challenges received little real scrutiny.
Child marriage continues to undermine the futures of millions of girls, yet it remained largely missing from the political debate.
During the pre-election citizen dialogues organised by the Centre for Policy Dialogue, we, along with other researchers, drew attention to a major policy contradiction. Political parties appealed to the country’s 62.8 million female voters with pledges of free higher education and new institutions for women.
Yet these promises sit uneasily alongside the stubborn reality that many girls are still being married before they can finish secondary school. For them, university is not a deferred opportunity but an impossibility.
There is a long-standing belief in Bangladesh that expanding girls’ education will naturally reduce child marriage. From our perspectives as researchers, we find this assumption both hopeful and incomplete.
Education matters deeply. But child marriage has persisted in Bangladesh despite significant progress in educational gender parity in the last three decades. Financial supports such as conditional transfers help families manage the cost of schooling, but they do not automatically give girls greater say in the decisions that shape their lives. The barriers often lie within social norms that continue to prioritise early marriage over long-term opportunity.
This year’s election also revealed the limits of relying on political symbolism alone. The BNP’s decisive victory was helped by public discomfort with regressive comments from senior leaders of the rival Jamaat-e-Islami alliance, who questioned whether women were fit to lead political parties or serve as Prime Minister.
Yet the electoral rejection of this rhetoric has not yet translated into a detailed plan for tackling gender inequality. Throughout the campaign, many parties chose a strategy of what commentators called “constructive ambiguity” on sensitive social issues. Proposals for reform were often framed as politically risky or divisive, and calls for specific commitments on child marriage were treated as optional rather than essential.
Even where legal interventions have been attempted, their effects have been mixed.
The Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 sought to provide a stronger framework, but its “special circumstances” clause created space for continued under-aged marriage. Recent research found that harsher penalties sometimes encouraged families to arrange earlier marriages to avoid what they feared might be legal complications.
This type of backlash highlights why legal change must be accompanied by community engagement, clear communication, and realistic expectations about how social norms shift.
As the world marked International Women’s Day 2026 under the theme “Give to Gain”, we found ourselves thinking about the work we have been doing through the SAFE Plus project with colleagues from BLAST and King’s College London.
The most encouraging progress we have seen has come not from punitive measures but from supporting young people as leaders within their own communities. When girls and boys gain the confidence and skills to challenge long-held assumptions, change begins to take root locally and sustainably.
But for girls to lead, they must first have the time and space to grow into leadership.
If the new government is serious about its ambitions for national development, then child marriage must move from the margins of policy to its centre. Free higher education means little if the path to it is blocked long before university age. Ending child marriage is not just a social goal. It is the foundation that makes every other ambition achievable.
Zaki Wahhaj is a Professor of Development Economics in the Department of International Development, King’s College London. M Niaz Asadullah is a Bangladeshi economist and educationist, scholar and academic. He is currently a visiting professor of economics at the University of Reading.