Official Statistics

1. Child Marriage
Sex Ratio
Bread Earner

2. Child Marriage

3. • Marriage should be a time for celebration
and joy
• Marriage is the intimate union and equal
partnership of a man and a woman.
Marriage is a vital part of a Muslim’s life.
In fact marriage is so important in the
religion of Islam.
The Prophet himself married and
also encouraged others to marry.

4. It has been reported that The Prophet
Muhammad said,
‘A person who possesses the means
to marry (i.e. he is able to work etc. to
support a wife and children) and does
not marry then he is not from amongst
us (i.e. the believers).’
In Islam, marriage is a contract between a
man and the woman, who gives her to the
husband to be his wife. The bride is to
consent to the marriage of her own free will.

5. • Child marriage is defined as a
formal marriage or informal union entered
into by an individual before reaching the
age of 18.
While child marriage is effected on both
boys and girls, but majority of those affected
by the practice are girls.

6. For both boys and girls, early
marriage has profound physical,
intellectual, psychological and
emotional consequences, cutting off
educational opportunities and
chances for personal growth.

7. In many cases, only one marriage-partner is a child, usually the
female, due to importance placed upon female virginity.
Child marriages are also driven by
 poverty
 cultural traditions
 laws that allow child marriages
 Religious
 social pressures
 regional customs
 fear of remaining unmarried
illiteracy
 perceived inability of women to work for money.

8. Child marriages were common throughout human
history. Today, child marriages are still fairly
widespread in some developing areas of the world,
such as parts of
• Africa
• South Asia
• Southeast
• East Asia
• West Asia
• Latin America
• Oceania
The incidence rates of child marriage have been
falling in most parts of the world.

9. The five nations with the highest observed rates of child
marriages in the world, below the age of 18, are
• Niger
• Chad
• Mali
• Bangladesh
• Guinea
The top three nations with greater than 20% rates of child
marriages below the age of 15 are Niger, Bangladesh and
Guinea

10. As many as 1 in 3 girls in non
developing areas of the world are
married before reaching the age of
18, and an estimated 1 in 9 girls in
developing countries are married by
age 15. One of the most commons
causes of death for girls aged 15 to
19 in developing countries child
birth.

11. Every year, an estimated 64 million girls
aged under 18 are married worldwide with
little or no say in the matter. In the
developing world, one in seven girls is
married before her 15th birthday and some
child brides are as young as eight or nine.
Neither physically nor emotionally ready to
become wives and mothers, these girls are
at far greater risk of experiencing
dangerous complications becoming
infected with HIV/AIDS and suffering dome

12. This policy brief highlights five evidence-
based strategies identified by ICRW to delay
or prevent child marriage:
Empower girls with information, skills and
support networks
Provide economic support and incentives to
girls and their families
 Educate and rally parents and community
members
Enhance girls' access to a high-quality
education
 Encourage supportive laws and policies.

13. Sex Ratio

14. • The proportion of males to females in a given population,
usually expressed as the number of males per 100
females.
• The sex ratio in humans is approximately 1:1. The sex
ratio at birth is commonly thought to be 106 boys to 100
girls, though this value is subject to debate in the
scientific community

15. • Worldwide, there are 106 boy babies born for
every 100 girl babies. This skewed ratio is
partly due to sex-selective abortion and
"gendercide," the killing of female infants, in
countries such as China and India where
males are more desired.
• But even discounting those factors, the
completely natural male-to-female sex ratio
still hovers around 106:100, meaning that
women are inherently more likely to give birth
to boys.

16. In a study around 2002, the natural sex ratio at
birth was estimated to be close to 1.06
males/female.
In most populations, adult males tend to have
higher death rates than adult females of the
same age both due to natural causes such as
heart attacks and strokes, which account for
by far the majority of deaths and also to violent
causes, such as homicide and warfare

17. Bread Earner

18. Bread earner has no definite English
meaning. However, when separated
into two words, they refer to a person
who is the primary source of support
for a family.

19. One of the most radical changes in
European society in the past 30 years has
been the growth of dual-earner husband-
wife families. Between 1967 and 1993, the
proportion of such families almost doubled
from 33% to 60%.

20. • One effect of these two phenomena has
been the growing proportion of working
couples in which the wife earns more
than her husband.
• This proportion has risen from 11% to
25% over the last two and- a-half
decades.
but the growth has been uneven.
Between 1967 and 1982, the incidence
rose from 11% to 18% of dual-earner
families, or about half a percentage point
a year.

21. • Throughout most of the 1980s, the
rate hovered at about 19%. Then,
in the space of five years, the
proportion of wives with higher
earnings than their husbands’
jumped by 6 percentage points,
from 19% in 1989 to 25% in 1993,
representing a total of 931,000
families.

23. The husband’s unemployment, reflected in his much
smaller contribution to family income, points to the
main reason for the sharp rise in primary-earner
wives in recent years.
In almost one-third of families in which the wife was
the higher earner, the husband had been
unemployed at some point in
1993; in fact, almost half had been jobless for more
than 26 weeks . In contrast, 88% of primary- earner
husbands had been employed full year; of this great
majority, almost all had worked full time. because
the husbands retire and the wives, usually younger,
continue to work.
Indeed, the labour force participation rates of older
women have continued to rise during the 1990s
while those of women under45 have not