Marriage Isn’t Dying in Africa—It’s Being Constrained

By Richard Sebaggala (PhD)

 

Today, while preparing to publish my weekly article on the economics of artificial intelligence, I came across an article titled “What’s Killing Marriage—Unmarriageable Men or Liberal Women?” by Maria Baer and Brad Wilcox. The article draws on new US survey evidence showing a sharp decline in women’s confidence in marriage. According to recent Pew data, the share of 12th-grade girls in the United States who say they expect to get married one day has fallen from 83 percent in 1993 to 61 percent in 2023—a drop of more than twenty percentage points in just three decades. Over the same period, young men’s desire for marriage has remained relatively stable at around 75 percent.

 

These figures are striking. They suggest that marriage in the United States is increasingly being questioned not because men have abandoned it, but because many women no longer believe it will improve their lives. Among liberal women in particular, marriage and childbearing now rank low compared to priorities such as career fulfillment, financial security, and emotional well-being. This shift has generated intense debate in the West about whether the decline of marriage reflects male economic decline, feminist ideology, cultural change, or the corrosive influence of digital technology.

 

Reading this, I found myself asking a different question. If marriage is described as “alarming” in a high-income country like the United States, with relatively strong institutions and social safety nets, what does the marriage story look like in Africa?

 

After stepping back and considering both data and lived realities across African societies, it becomes clear that Africa is not experiencing the same phenomenon. The weakening of marriage in Africa does not stem from a loss of faith in the institution itself. In fact, most African women still express strong aspirations for marriage and family life. Marriage remains central to social identity, respectability, and life meaning across cultures, religions, and income groups. Yet marriage is increasingly delayed, informal, or avoided in practice. This apparent contradiction points to a different underlying problem.

 

What Africa is facing is not ideological rejection, but what can best be described as aspirational frustration. Many women want marriage, but they do not want poor-quality marriages. Expectations around economic stability, emotional maturity, mutual respect, and security have risen, while the conditions necessary to meet those expectations have deteriorated. As a result, marriage is postponed, approached cautiously, or entered into only under strict conditions. It is not rejected in principle, but deferred in practice.

 

A central driver of this frustration lies in the political economy of male economic vulnerability. Much like in the United States, African public discourse often speaks of a shortage of “marriageable men.” But in Africa, this is less a story of cultural malaise and more one of structural exclusion. High youth unemployment, widespread informality, unstable incomes, and delayed economic independence make it difficult for many men to meet longstanding expectations of provision and responsibility. Since marriage in many African societies remains closely tied to economic readiness, this instability increases the risks associated with formal unions, especially for women who disproportionately bear the long-term costs of household failure and childrearing.

 

Digital technology is also reshaping expectations, though in a different way from the West. Rather than fueling explicit ideological opposition to marriage, social media in Africa rapidly globalizes lifestyles, aspirations, and relationship ideals. Exposure to highly curated images of success, romance, and consumption raises expectations faster than incomes grow and institutions adapt. Traditional responsibilities remain in place, modern aspirations multiply, and economic capacity lags behind both. The result is growing dissatisfaction not with marriage itself, but with the likelihood of achieving a version of marriage that feels stable and dignified.

 

Importantly, marriage in Africa still correlates strongly with well-being when it works. Evidence from household surveys and well-being studies consistently shows higher life satisfaction among those in stable unions, especially where economic stress and conflict are limited. However, as marital quality deteriorates under economic and social strain, the benefits of marriage weaken. For many women, delaying marriage becomes a rational strategy to avoid long-term vulnerability rather than a rejection of family life.

 

This means that marriage in Africa is not dying; it is being constrained. It is gradually shifting from an expected life stage to a high-stakes decision, from a collective institution to an individual risk calculation. If current trends continue without meaningful economic and institutional reform, the likely outcomes are continued delays in formal marriage, growth of informal and unstable unions, and increasing single parenthood driven not by ideology, but by constrained choices.

 

The contrast with the United States is therefore crucial. While many women in the US are losing faith in marriage as an institution—clearly reflected in the sharp decline in stated desire to marry—many women in Africa still believe in marriage but cannot find the conditions that make it viable. Africa’s marriage challenge is not primarily about values or belief. It is about economics, employment, and the widening gap between aspirations and lived realities.

 

Conditions, unlike beliefs, can be changed. But doing so requires moving beyond moral panic and imported culture wars, and instead treating marriage as part of Africa’s broader social and economic infrastructure. If we are willing to confront the structural roots of aspirational frustration, marriage in Africa remains a resilient institution—not because people are clinging to it blindly, but because they are still waiting for it to work.