Bolivia has closed a legal loophole that left thousands of girls vulnerable to early marriage. On September 25, 2025 C.E., the country’s new Law No. 1639 took effect, setting 18 as the firm minimum age for marriage and civil unions — with no exceptions. The previous law had allowed marriage from age 16 with parental or judicial approval, a gap that advocates say was routinely used to formalize pregnancies and silence girls who had experienced sexual violence.
At a glance
- Child marriage ban: Bolivia’s Law No. 1639 eliminates all exceptions to the minimum marriage age of 18, closing loopholes that existed under the previous Family Code since 2014.
- Scale of the problem: Bolivia’s Office of the Ombudsman recorded more than 4,800 marriages and early unions involving adolescents aged 16 and 17 between 2014 and 2024, often connected to sexual violence and forced pregnancies.
- Regional context: Bolivia now joins more than a dozen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean — including Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru — that have set 18 as the unconditional legal minimum age for marriage.
Why the old law failed girls
Bolivia’s previous Family and Family Procedure Code allowed marriage at 16 or 17 with parental consent or a judge’s sign-off. On paper, that sounded like a safeguard. In practice, it became a mechanism that often worked against girls rather than for them.
A 2020 study by Plan International and UNFPA found that 22% of Bolivian adolescent girls between 15 and 19 had been married or in a union at least once. Many of those unions followed sexual violence or adolescent pregnancy — situations where the law’s exceptions made it easier to legalize harm than to address it. Girls frequently dropped out of school. Their access to healthcare narrowed. Their options contracted.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child had repeatedly urged Bolivia to eliminate those exceptions. Civil society organizations — including Plan International, which supported this reform through technical advocacy and evidence-gathering — kept the pressure on lawmakers. After years of sustained effort, the legislature acted.
What the new law actually does
The reform is direct: no marriage or civil union for anyone under 18, regardless of parental approval or judicial authorization. There are no carve-outs.
The law aligns Bolivia with its existing international commitments, including the Belém do Pará Convention and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which call for ending child marriage globally by 2030. Bolivia is now among a growing group of countries in the region where the law and those commitments finally match.
Plan International’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Carmen Elena Alemán, called the change “a huge step forward for girls and adolescents in Bolivia,” noting that removing the legal loopholes “makes clear that no girl should be married or forced to live with a partner before turning 18.”
The work that remains
Advocates are careful not to overstate what a law can accomplish on its own. Plan International has been explicit: legislation is necessary but not sufficient. Bolivia still needs programs that shift the social and gender norms that normalize early marriage in the first place. Girls who are already in unions need access to services, support, and legal protection. Poverty and gender inequality — the structural conditions that make early marriage more likely — require sustained investment to address.
Latin America and the Caribbean remains the only region in the world where child marriage rates have not significantly declined over the past 25 years, according to Girls Not Brides. Bolivia’s new law matters precisely because it confronts that trend directly — but enforcement and follow-through will determine whether the change is felt in girls’ actual lives.
A regional signal worth noting
Bolivia is now one of more than a dozen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to prohibit child marriage without exception. That growing list — Chile, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the Dominican Republic among them — represents years of organized advocacy by civil society groups, researchers, and young people themselves.
When one country closes a legal gap that enabled harm for years, it demonstrates to neighboring countries that change is achievable. It also validates the model: evidence-based advocacy, sustained over time, working through democratic institutions, can produce laws that protect children more fully than the ones they replace.
The Plan International State of the World’s Girls Report 2025 frames this moment clearly — child marriage remains a global threat to millions of girls, and every country that eliminates legal exceptions narrows the space where that harm can legally occur. Bolivia’s action is part of that story.
For girls in Bolivia, the change is immediate and real. No public official can now legally register a marriage involving someone under 18. The path to education, to health, to a future shaped by their own choices, is — in law at least — more open than it was before September 25, 2025 C.E.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Plan International
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