Concerns of global education policy with gender disparities in access to, and achievement in, basic education in Sub-Saharan Africa since the millennium have repeatedly turned to the prevalence of early marriage to explain educational inequalities, positioning marriage as a barrier to education and girls as its victims. This thesis investigates the philosophical basis and empirical evidence for this global policy discourse by examining the connections between education and marriage for adolescent girls in Kaduna state, North West Nigeria.

The study maps and unpacks data and discourses on girls’ education and early marriage across academic scholarship, policy literature, and empirical data, asking whether and how education is protective of adolescent girls in relation to marriage, and why girls marry. It adopts a mixed methods approach, connecting quantitative and qualitative methods and data to evidence different aspects of the interactions between marriage and schooling, deepening – contextually and conceptually – explanations for when, how and why school-age girls marry. Qualitative data, in the form of interviews and focus groups with girls, teachers, and policy makers, augment findings from analyses of quantitative data from the Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey, to illuminate the significance of girls’ agency and relationships to expectations and experiences of schooling and marriage. Inter-personal relations and negotiation are central tenets of Nigerian feminist theorisations of women and girls’ everyday lives, which this study promotes in seeking to reframe and reformulate assumptions about adolescent girls, marriage, and education.

The study shows that girls marry for myriad reasons associated with their social conditions and experiences of formal schooling. The interplay of schooling with marriage suggests that the rhetoric on education as protective against marriage is simplistic and over-stated. Basic education, marriage and adolescence are deeply interconnected and living these interconnections is a dynamic and negotiated process among girls, families, schools and communities. Consideration to these interactions and, in particular, to the gendered and relational microcosms of schools and their effects on norms and agency is critical for progress towards equality in education and in girls’ social lives.