Empowering adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh: Kishori Abhijan

G irls and women in Bangladesh have benefited from rapid social change in the past two decades. Girls surpassed boys in primary-school completion in the 1990s, fertility levels were halved from six births per woman to fewer than three, and one-third of married women belonged to self-help and credit groups. Yet despite this progress, the majority of adolescent girls in Bangladesh still find their lives constrained by the custom of early marriage. According to recent research, 68 percent of women aged 20–24 were married before the legal minimum age of 18 (Amin et al. 2006). Married adolescent girls were socially isolated, they had fewer friends and reported feeling vulnerable, and they had little knowledge of health risks and sexuality.