Eliminating Child Marriage: Costs and Benefits of an Intervention Program

This special seminar will be delivered by zoom.

Professor Bruce Rasmussen and Dr John Symons, Victoria University, share findings from their research project on eliminating child marriage.

Professor Bruce Rasmussen is the Director for the Victoria Institute for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University,  BEc (Hons) (La Trobe Univ), MEc (La Trobe Univ), MPA (Harvard), PhD (Econ) (VU).

Professor Bruce Rasmussen has been Director of VISES since 2011, having previously been Deputy Director from 2002. His work has encompassed health economics, regional economics, innovation and economic development. His recent work has included estimating the economic returns to investment in health, for UNICEF, UNFPA, United States Chamber of Commerce, WHO and APEC Life Sciences Innovation Forum (LSIF).

He led work on the 2015–17 UNFPA adolescent project on evaluating interventions to reduce child marriage and intimate partner violence, with results published in The Lancet (Sheehan et al. 2017) and later in the Journal of Adolescent Health (Rasmussen et al. 2019). Other multi-country evaluation studies have estimated the benefit-cost ratios for interventions to treat disease and health conditions for children and mothers, those with mental health issues and for a range of interventions to improve the well-being of adolescents. This included recent work for UNICEF Burundi and for UNFPA in India (resulting in a publication in the Journal of Global Health Reports (Rasmussen et al. 2021). He is currently finalising a report to UNICEF on investing in education in post-conflict Syria.

Dr John Symons, Research Fellow

John Symons is an economist with experience in a number of applied economic areas including health, education, road safety, green infrastructure, waste and recycling. He has considerable experience modelling investment cases for achieving health, education and child marriage related Sustainable Development Goals in low and middle income countries. These investment cases were undertaken in collaboration with the UNFPA and UNICEF and published in The Lancet and Journal of Adolescent Health. Dr Symons has also developed a child marriage optimisation model to select the combination of interventions that reduces child marriage at least cost for each country or region.

Dr Symons has a Bachelor of Science, Graduate Diploma of Education, a Masters of Environmental Planning and PhD in Environmental Economics.

The Judith Lumley Centre lunchtime seminars are free and open to all.  They are held on the first Wednesday of every month from February to December from 12.30 -1.30pm and also extra seminars at different times. These seminars showcase the work of national and international academics/researchers.

Find out more about the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the Judith Lumley Centre

https://latrobe.zoom.us/j/86147618557