This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.

This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.

eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...

The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...

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flossly 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...

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wat10000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I suspect there would be broad agreement across the political spectrum that more education means later marriage and later first pregnancy. The disagreement would mostly be over whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

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svnt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Complication from pregnancy is the leading cause of death in 15-19 year old girls, and second in 10-14, only because many of them are not yet able to conceive. We have excellent data on this.

Later marriage/first pregnancy is clearly a good thing.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...

	▲	mothballed 11 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		When I looked up causes of death in Nigeria, malaria blew away anything maternal related[]. Not that I would want to die of either. Another big one was HIV/AIDS. I guess it depends on cultural factors whether early marriage might reduce the number of partners that could introduce HIV/aids. If non-married people are less monogamous it's conceivable the increased risk of HIV/AIDS could overpower the risks of whatever additional childbirth is associated with marriage. Also note pollution was one of the bigger risks present in Nigeria. So as people get educated to go slave away in a dirty factory it might actually be worse for their health than staying at home and marrying into some pastoral herding tribe or something. [] https://ourworldindata.org/profile/health/nigeria
	▲	wat10000 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I completely agree, but there's a decent chunk of people out there who don't.

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flossly an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Smaller families, better education level of the next gen, ...

But yeah, if you are afraid of a war you want your group to be big, uneducated, easy to manipulate and expendable.