Role of Bride Price in Africa: Upholding Child Marriages or Increasing Girls’ Education?

Abstract

This thesis is a literature review that investigates how a cultural norm, the bride price tradition, is directing people’s economic behavior in Africa. Bride price is a marriage practice where the groom makes a payment to the bride’s family upon marriage, either in the form of money, cattle, or commodities (Nyyssölä 2022). More specifically, this thesis investigates how bride price links to child marriage and women’s education.

Findings include that bride price appears to encourage parents to send their daughters to marriage early, as a way to smooth consumption under poverty (Corno and Voena 2023, Corno et. al 2020). On the other hand, bride price increases in a woman’s education, therefore incentivizing parents to educate girls (Ashraf et. al 2020).

Alternative methods for parents to smooth consumption and incentivizing girls’ education are discussed. These methods include microfinance and conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs. From this discussion, it is concluded that microfinance holds potential to provide families with enough means to educate their daughters and thus prevent child marriage (Abdullah et. al 2015). When a cash transfer program is conditional on a girl’s education, it appears to improve girls’ schooling rates (Baird 2011).