The global scandal of 400 million child brides

18. Nepal, 41 per cent.

19. Dominican Republic, 41 per cent.

20. Ethiopia, 41 per cent.

The Pew Religious Futures program, which measures religious belief across countries, reveals that of the UNICEF top 20 countries for child marriage 10 are countries with a majority Christian population, eight are majority Muslim, and two are predominantly Hindu. (see table below).

Girls Not Brides: Child marriage prevalence is the percentage of women 20-24 years, who were married or in union before they were 18 (UNICEF State of the World's Children, 2013). It's based on Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), Demo-graphic and Health Surveys (DHS) and other national surveys, and refers to most recent year available in the period 2002-11.

UNICEF rates countries according to the percentage of women aged 20-24 years who were married or in a union before they were 18 years old.

For example, Niger is rated as the number one nation for child brides, with 75 per cent of women aged 20-24 married before the age of 18.

Because of the sheer size of India (2.1 billion people) and its high rate of child brides, India has the highest number of child brides.

The numbers are staggering. In 2013, 47 percent of India's women 20-24 years were child brides. Conservatively that means that, given at least half the women 15 and over were child brides, more than 210 million Indian women over the age of 15 were child brides.

This is despite the legal age of marriage being 18 years.

In recent times, fewer Indian girls are marrying before the age of 15, falling from 23.5 percent to 18.2 percent. However at the same time, rates of marriage have increased for girls in the 15-18 age group, increasing from 26.7 per cent to 29.2 per cent between the late 1990s and 2006.