Social and behavior change interventions to reduce child marriage must address root causes to resolve deep-seated social and cultural issues that drive child marriage.

Synthesizing research on faith actors in global health and development and viewing these research results through the lens of social norms theory, this article puts forward a framing for analyzing religious drivers of child marriage.

This framework can help practitioners better understand the root causes of child marriage when designing social and behavior change interventions that aim to work with faith actors on religiously related drivers of child marriage.

This tool is designed for use during contextual analysis and formative research phases of program design.

This article provides an analysis of social and behavioral drivers of child marriage to advance the protection and empowerment of girls from child marriage. Child marriage directly negatively affects girls and boys and, more broadly, negatively impacts their families and communities. Our analysis emerges from work undertaken for UNICEF’s Global Initiative on Faith and Positive Change for Children, Families, and Communities (FPCC). Child marriage affects many dimensions of a girl’s well-being, from their health to their education. Every year, 12 million girls1 across countries, cultures, religions, and ethnicities experience child marriage, which, according to UNICEF’s definition, is understood as “any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child.”2 Delaying marriage improves girls’ opportunities to attend school, select a safe and healthy livelihood and “develop more fully as an individual in her own right.”3 Child marriage is a persistent problem despite the fact that many countries with high rates of child marriage have civil laws that explicitly prohibit child marriage and set a minimum age for marriage.4

Faith actors are both a force in perpetuating child marriage …