Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. This week

day though, we in Britain are on holiday, so we've got a few stories we've been saving

up for you. In China there's a growing trend for wearing

Hanfu clothing inspired by the traditional dress of the majority Han ethnicity. Much of

it is goofy fun, but there are ethnic overtones to the hobby that consume worry the country's

leadership. And for some, Scrabble is more than just a word game. It's a globally competitive pursuit.

For many players it can even be a way out of poverty. Perhaps foolishly, I challenge Africa's

first world Scrabble champion to a match. But first, each year in Sub-Saharan Africa more than

a third of girls married before the age of 18. In a country such as Niger, the rate is as high

as three out of four. The practice persists mainly in places that are remote and underdeveloped.

But as our Ethiopia correspondent Tom Gardner found, some lessons on how to reduce child

marriage rates can be gleaned from an unexpected place. I went to this village in Highland,

Ethiopia called Kermap. This is a sort of place that hasn't changed a great deal. Over the

centuries it's still very much a traditional society, religious, smallholder farmers. But what's

interesting is it's seen particularly good results in the last four to five years in bringing

what was a relatively high prevalence of child marriage down quite dramatically. One third of

the villages in this district reported no child marriages at all last year and the

Kermap, the village I went to, only had one. And is that unusual in Ethiopia?

Well, I mean this broadly speaking is the story of Ethiopia. It was once among Africa's top five

countries for child marriage. So we're talking almost 50% of women marrying before they were 18.

The practice has dropped by third in the past decade, which is the world's sharpest decline.

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