After a three-day visit to the country, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell on Tuesday urged Bangladesh to end child marriage and close the gaps in national law that still allow it.

In a statement released on October 20, Russell called for immediate investment in Bangladesh’s children. Her first priority was ending child marriage and keeping girls in school, as UNICEF says early marriage pushes girls out of education and leads to early pregnancy. She also urged the government to meet its pledge to spend five percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on education and on health. “Budgets reflect priorities,” she said, welcoming the government’s promise to raise both budgets and stressing that the promise must now be put into action.

UNICEF did not say which legal provisions it wants changed. Under Bangladesh’s Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2017, a marriage is a child marriage if the woman is under 18 or the man is under 21. However, Section 19 of the Act says such a marriage is not an offence if it takes place under “special circumstances” and in the best interests of the minor, accompanied by a court’s direction and parental consent.

In June, Women and Children Affairs Minister Abu Zafar Md. Zahid Hossain told Parliament that an amendment to the Act was being drafted to close the gap created by that loophole, which he said had sometimes allowed child marriages. The draft would require digital birth records for marriage registration so that forged or inaccurate certificates can no longer be used to hide a girl’s age.

According to the Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey of 2025, 47.2 percent of women aged 20 to 24 were married before they turned 18. That figure is down from 51 percent in UNICEF’s 2020 analysis, which ranked Bangladesh as the highest country for child marriage in South Asia and placed it among the ten worst countries in the world. The same analysis found that progress would have to be at least eight times faster than in the previous decade for Bangladesh to reach its own goal of ending child marriage by 2041.

Bangladesh is also bound by international law. It is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which states that the marriage of a child “shall have no legal effect.” The 2017 Act punishes those involved in child marriages but does not render the marriage void.

Russell also urged the government to keep girls in school and to protect learning for Rohingya and host-community children.