Impact of Child Marriage on the Demographic Dividend

Demographic Dividend:

Demographic dividend is the freeing up of resources for utilization of the progress of the nation. When a nation’s fertility rate reduces, as a result, lesser people are in the dependent segment and more people are in the labour force. This is a golden opportunity for a country. Countries like china have utilized this opportunity to become one of the largest economies in the world.

There are some pre-requisites for demographic dividend, e.g. decreasing fertility rate, increasing life expectancy etc (Gribble & Bremner, 2012).

Demographic dividend in Bangladesh:

Bangladesh has been seeing falling fertility rate since 2000s as a result of which slowly the size of dependent population has decreased. Today we have about 65% of the population in the labour workforce. Which is helping Bangladesh gain unprecedented growth over the past decade. However, this may not last for long. Generally demographic dividend in a nation goes on for around 5 decades. We are nearly half way through ours. However, lack of new job creation means Bangladesh is not being able to utilize the full potential of this golden opportunity.

How child marriage comes into play:

Bangladesh is seeing relatively stagnation in the reduction of fertility rate. Child marriage can be held as an important reason for this. Firstly, in Bangladesh contraception usage rate is the lowest among young couples while sexual activity is highest. Secondly, it is harder for a young bride to negotiate Planned Parenthood than a mature women. This inevitably results in an increase in the birth rate. It is also reflected in BDHS data, one of the highest fertility rate is amongst 15-19 year old women (NIPORT, 2014; NIPORT, Associates, & International, 2013). Thirdly, repeated pregnancy and pregnancy related complications have adverse effect on mothers as well as children. Which hampers productivity of mother as well as future children. This translates into poor contribution by the family to national economy (Sonfield, Hasstedt, Kavanaugh, & Anderson, 2013).

So, efforts need to be strengthened in order to lower child marriage, which will help in turn reduce fertility rate and improve productivity of mothers.

References:

Gribble, J., & Bremner, J. (2012). The challenge of attaining the demographic dividend. Retrieved from http://www.prb.org/pdf12/demographic-dividend.pdf

NIPORT. (2014). Health Survey, Key Indicators, Bangladesh.

NIPORT, Associates, M. and, & International, I. (2013). Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 2011. Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 2011. Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:Bangladesh+Demographic+Health+Survey#8%5Cnhttp://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:Bangladesh+Demographic+and+Health+Survey,+2004#0

Sonfield, A., Hasstedt, K., Kavanaugh, M. L., & Anderson, R. (2013). The Social and Economic Benefits of Women ’ s Ability To Determine Whether and When to Have Children. New York: Guttmacher Institute, (March).

This Article is written with inspiration from a newspaper article examining the opportunity of demographic dividend.

Picture taken from IIFL.