“It is so hard to change people’s thinking,” said Ram Bahadur Chand, an official with Nepal’s child welfare board. “They do not see that child marriage destroys their futures. It is a kind of violence.”

Nepal has tried to make inroads. The government recently increased the minimum age for women to marry by two years, to 20, matching the age for men. In January, officials announced cash incentives and bicycles for families who kept their daughters in school. Activists have organized along Nepal’s border with India to intercept young brides at risk of being trafficked into prostitution. The country has vowed to eradicate child marriage by 2030, and in some districts much sooner.

But the government’s efforts have met with limited success. Apart from poverty and lack of education, the problem, activists say, is partly linked to the nature of labor in Nepal, a rugged, mountainous nation powered by remittances from citizens working abroad.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of men leave Nepal for grueling construction jobs in the Persian Gulf. For poorer families, marrying their daughters to boys before they head abroad is perceived as both financially advantageous and a necessity. When villages empty of men, “families need girls to take care of the elderly and handle household activities,” said Tarak Dhital, a social activist in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.