By Pelajar Bukan Pengantin

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: PelajarBukanPengantin views with grave concern the Perak State Government’s proposal to introduce a RM500 First-Time Marriage Incentive for individuals aged 15 to 35, reportedly under consideration for Budget 2027. We recognise the intention to ease the financial burden young couples face in starting a family — but setting eligibility as low as 15 sends an unacceptable message about childhood, education and marriage. We call on the Perak State Government, in the firmest terms, to exclude everyone below 18 from this or any marriage incentive scheme.

A child is not a bride, nor a bridegroom, in waiting. No state budget, however well-intentioned, should ever place a price on a child’s wedding day. Under Malaysia’s own Child Act 2001, a person below eighteen is, without qualification, a child — a technical label of “youth” for the purposes of youth development policy cannot, and must not, override the protections a child is owed by right.

As the SUHAKAM Children’s Commissioners rightly observed in their statement of 30 August 2026, calling a fifteen-year-old a “youth” does not, and cannot, divest that child of the protections owed to them by right. We fully endorse that position.

Poverty demands solutions, not marriages

Our deepest concern is that economic hardship will be used to justify marrying off children. Poverty is real, but its answer is not RM500 offered to a child at the marriage registrar’s office — it is stronger access to education, expanded social protection, livelihood support, and greater economic assistance to families. 

Malaysia’s own National Strategic Plan on Addressing the Causes of Child Marriage recognises poverty as a driver of child marriage and its prescribed response is coordinated action across legislation, education, health, social protection and community engagement — not the facilitation of marriage. A child should never have to become a spouse for their family to achieve economic security. Marriage must never substitute for social protection.

Children belong in classrooms, not marriage contracts

Malaysia has only just extended compulsory schooling to the secondary level, precisely to keep those under 18 in the classroom. Perak cannot, in the same breath, dangle an incentive that beckons those very children toward marriage instead. This proposal is therefore not merely a question of financial assistance — it is a question of what future the state chooses to invest in for its children.

Perak must move forward, not backward

Nor is this consistent with Perak’s own record. In 2019, the then Minister of Women, Family and Community Development told Parliament that state governments had been consulted on raising the minimum age of marriage to 18, and Perak was among six states that agreed to amend their State Islamic Family Law accordingly[1]. Seven years on, that amendment remains unmade — even as the state now considers subsidising marriage among the very children it once pledged to protect. A state that has already committed to raising the minimum age of marriage should not now send the opposite signal.

Malaysia must honour its commitment to end child marriage

Malaysia already holds a national commitment to end child marriage through the National Strategic Plan on Addressing the Causes of Child Marriage, launched in January 2020. That commitment must remain the baseline for policymaking. Malaysia should not be asking how to make child marriage easier, more affordable, or more acceptable. Malaysia should be asking how to end it altogether.

PelajarBukanPengantin calls upon the Perak State Government to:

1. Exclude everyone below eighteen, without exception, from the proposed RM500 First-Time Marriage Incentive and any future marriage incentive scheme, without recourse to “youth” categorisation as a means of circumventing child protections.

2. Withdraw and redirect the proposed RM500, pending revision of the scheme, toward education, skills development, social protection and economic empowerment for children and young people — a more meaningful and lasting investment in their future.

3. Legislate without delay to fix the minimum age of marriage uniformly at eighteen, for both sexes, under the Islamic Family Law Enactment (Perak) 2004, in line with SUHAKAM’s recommendation and Perak’s own 2019 undertaking — closing the provision that still permits girls to marry at sixteen.

4. Provide a public account of progress under Malaysia’s National Strategic Plan on Addressing the Causes of Child Marriage, including the steps taken by the Federal Government to fulfil its own commitment to end child marriage.

Children deserve better: education, protection, healthcare, economic security, and the chance to shape their own futures — not marriage offered as an answer to poverty, family pressure, pregnancy or stigma.

Children belong in classrooms, not in marriage contracts. PelajarBukanPengantin stands with SUHAKAM’s Children’s Commissioners in urging both the Perak State Government and the Federal Government to place the best interests of the child above every other consideration.

Children are pelajar, bukan pengantin.

*PelajarBukanPengantin Advocating for children’s education and against child marriage in Malaysia*