Role of Level of Education in Under-Age Marriage Prevention: A Study from Indonesia’s Rural Areas

The prevalence of early marriage in Indonesia remains high. Adolescent pregnancy carries a significant risk of situations that may put the mother’s and the foetus’s health at risk, thus becoming a public health issue in the present and future. The aim is to analyse the education role in early marriage prevention in Indonesia's rural areas. We examined 4,360 adolescent girls. The study employed early marriage as an outcome variable, education as an exposure variable, and six control variables (age, employment, wealth, previous sexual intercourse experience, access to family planning (FP) information from print media, and access to FP from electronic media). The study employed binary logistics regression in the final test. The study showed that the average early marriage in Indonesia's rural areas was 11.9% nationally. Based on the education level, secondary education was 7.364 times more likely than primary education not to experience early marriage (AOR 7.364; 95% CI 4.614-11.755). Moreover, higher education was 21.679 times more likely than primary education (AOR 21.679; 95% CI 4.450-105.609). The study concluded that education had a role in early marriage prevention in Indonesia's rural areas. The higher the level of education, the higher the possibility of not experiencing early marriage.