Prevalence of Early Marriage and Its Consequences among Reproductive Age Women in Bale Zone, Ethiopia

Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of early marriage in the world, with one in two girls marrying before her 18 th birthday and one in five girls marrying before the age of 15. Early marriage means early sexual activity, and therefore early childbearing. Therefore this study intended to assess the prevalence and consequences of early marriage in Bale Zone. Community based cross-sectional study design was conducted in 2015, on a sample of 634 reproductive age women. The respondents were drawn from five randomly selected districts of Bale Zone. The total sample was allocated proportionally to each district based on the number of reproductive age women it has. Then, data were collected using pre-tested and structured questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS for windows version 17.0. The findings of the study were presented and analyzed using descriptive methods i.e. proportion, mean and standard deviation. In addition to this, bivariate and multivariate analysis was done to see the relation between variables and 95% CL with AOR was used. The mean marital age of the study participants was 17.05 (±2.8 SD). The prevalence of early marriage was 360 (58.7%). About two third, 67.7% of school attendants dropped out school because of their marriage. As compared to those who attend grade 9 and above, those who did not attend education and grade 1-8 were 6.81 (AOR= 6.81 95% CI; 1.34-34.49) and 2.41 (AOR= 2.41 95% CI; 1.29-4.51) times more likely to married early respectively. Rural residents were 4.60 (AOR= 4.60 95% CI; 1.80-11.74) times more likely to marry early than their urban resident counter parts.