VIENTIANE - The Lao Ministry of Education and Sports and the United Nations Population Fund have agreed to strengthen their partnership by continuing to build on their campaign titled "Noi".

The campaign was launched in 2016 on International Day of the Girl Child (Oct 11) and acknowledged the grim reality of adolescent girls documented by the country's 2015 Population and Housing Census, which showed that 42,000 adolescent girls have never attended school and 91,662 girls aged 6-16 have dropped out of school.

Girls out of school tend to marry younger and have children at a younger age, with Laos having the earliest age of marriage in the region; one in 10 girls marry by the age of 15, and early marriage is often related to early pregnancy.