Early Marriage among  young  girls in Eastern Ethiopia: trend during 2008-2018

Introduction

This dataset is used as a great source for researchers who study early marriage and interested in making use of it as a secondary use of their routinely collected data. It also enables to generalize the findings for a large community as it is huge in number and shows a trend of early marriage for more than a decade.

Early marriage is defined as any marriage or union between two people where at least one of the parties is under 18 years of age (OHCHR, 2019). Marriages that take place before age 15 are considered “very early marriages” (UNICEF, 2020).“Early marriage” has been interpreted, as synonymous with “child marriage” or as more inclusive as child marriage. ‘Early’ does not have to refer solely to age, however, and could be read to include other factors that would make a person unready to consent to marriage (Sri, 2013). It undermine girls’ autonomy and seriously affects their physical and mental wellbeing (Nour, 2006; Walker, Mukisa, Hashim, & Ismail, 2013).

The highest rate of child marriage is in sub-Saharan Africa, with 37 percent of young women marrying before age 18. According to the Ethiopian demography and health survey (EDHS) 2016, the national prevalence of early marriage was 58% (CSA, 2016). Ethiopia ranks 15th in the prevalence of early marriage and 5th in the total number of early marriages globally. Nearly 40% of girls in Ethiopia are married before they turn 18 years and approximately 14% are married before their 15th birthday (UNICEF, 2018). Monitoring the trend and understanding the drivers is essential in intervening against early marriage. However, evidence on the effectiveness of interventions from longitudinal community-based studies is scarce. Hence, we extracted data of girls of 10–17 years from the Kersa Health and Demographic Surveillance System (Kersa HDSS) database for the period of 2008–2018 in order to examine the trends of early marriage.

Methods and materials

This data note used data from an open dynamic cohort that gives leverage of a huge set of data from the exiting Health and Demographic Surveillance System (Kersa HDSS). The Kersa HDSS is located in the eastern Hararghe Zone of the Oromia regional state in Ethiopia. It is a demographic and health surveillance and research center established in 2007 by Haramaya University to serve as a research center and source of health and demographics data for Eastern Ethiopia, thus creating a framework for research at the community level and to be a platform for various health-related research by the College of Health and Medical Sciences in Haramaya University. The initial baseline household and population census’ were conducted in 2007, and the database is updated every six months with registration of demographic (birth, death and migration) and health (reproductive and morbidity) events (Assefa et al., 2016). Kersa HDSS does monitoring demographic events such as birth, death, marital status change, and migration; and health-related conditions such as pregnancy, immunization, and morbidity among children and adults. Data collectors who know the language of the community are permanently recruited and execute the data collection regularly. The data are collected by trained interviewers who are mainly residents in the study Kebele (the smallest administrative unit in Ethiopia). In each round of data collection, the household head or any adult member of the household is interviewed using structured forms that are prepared to capture a specific demographic or health event.

Data availability

Datasets are available publicly via:

Figshare: Early Marriage among young girls in Eastern Ethiopia: trend during 2008-2018.

https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15034812 (Abdurahman et al. 2021).

The project contains the following underlying data.

Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).

Author contributions

All authors contributed equally from conception, design, data extraction, and statistical analysis to interpretation of data. They also took part in the drafting of the manuscript and final approval for submission.