According to data, approximately 640 million girls worldwide have been married before reaching the age of 18 to date. Each year, an additional 12 million adolescent girls get married. This means that on average, one such case is recorded every three seconds. The highest number of cases occur in South Asian and African countries.
In Central Asia, however, the indicators have decreased. Specifically, the rate, which was 13 percent in 1999, has dropped to 6 percent in 2024. In Uzbekistan, between 1997–2022, the number of those married by age 15 was 48.5 thousand, while those married by age 18 constituted over 1.1 million.
According to UN Population Fund data, a decline is also being observed on a global scale. If in 2000 one in three young women was married before reaching adulthood, by 2021 this indicator had fallen to one in five. Over the past 25 years, 68 million cases have been prevented.
