World Bank Africa launches Blog4Dev competition – How to end child marriage

The nations in Sub-Saharan Africa has scored the lowest in skills, health, knowledge and resilience of all the world’s regions based on the 2018 World Bank Group Human Capital Index. Including insufficient student learning outcomes, this shows challenges such as high mortality and stunting rates.

The World Bank Africa Region has unveiled its Human Capital Plan with a noble objective to assist Sub-Saharan countries to combat with these issues. The target also includes combating against child mortality, saving millions of lives, averting stunting among 11 million children, and increasing learning outcomes for girls and boys in school by 20 percent.

First launched in 2014 by the World Bank Kenya office, the Blog4Dev (#Blog4Dev) competition is an annual writing contest that invites every year young people to weigh in on a topic critical to the country’s economic development.

“The adolescent fertility rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is 102 births per 1,000 girls—three times as high as in South Asia. This not only damaging for girls and their children, but it also hurts economic growth,” Hafez Ghanem, World Bank Vice President for Africa said. The plan also has an objective to empower women to prevent early marriage and pregnancy for adolescent girls.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of child marriage in the world. Nearly four out of 10 young women in this region were married before the age of 18. These young girls are having their childhoods cut short, but this goes far beyond a moral issue. This situation has a negative impact on development.

The participants must be a citizen of and currently living in, a Sub-Saharan Africa country and be between 18-28 years of age on November 30, 2019 (the deadline). The core topic is “What will it take to end child marriage in your country?