In West Africa, marriage is a major social institution. In Senegal, for example, in 2006, nearly 90% of women over 25 years of age were once married. It represents also a major disruption the daily life, especially for the bride, who in most cases leaves the household in which she grew up. Another important feature of marriage in West Africa is that it involves a large set of actors: not only the couple but also their parents and extended family. The ceremony is also characterized by important financial exchanges, between different people: the bride's, groom's and neighbours' families. These stylized facts can be examined in terms of their relationship to women's well-being within their households. The objective of this thesis is to add to the study of the subject.In the first chapter, we consider whether parents have incentives to marry their children to a member of the kin group in order to better insure against adverse idiosyncratic income shocks.Exploiting original panel data from a household survey collected in Senegal in 2006/2007 and 2011/2012, we find that daughters' within-kin-group marriage helps their parents' household to better smooth food consumption when a parent has fallen ill.This better smoothing is notably driven by the fact that households having married a daughter within the kin group receive relatively more transfers. Our results indicate that parents' demand for insurance can explain part of their demand for marrying within the kin group their daughter. They extend the literature on inter-linkages between marriage decisions and demand for insurance. The second chapter examines the impact of an education policy on women's well-being in Benin. Taking advantage of a sharp increase in school constructions in the 1990s in this country, we assess the causal impact of a primary education program on primary school attendance, age at marriage and tolerance of intimate partner violence. Using a double difference method, along with a regression kink design, we find that the program increased the probability to attend primary school in rural areas. The policy also decreased the probability to find wife beating tolerable. We show that, in this context, the benefits of girls' education have percolated down to women's well-being beyond the initial goal of the policy. In the third chapter, we investigate the relationship between the bride price and the well-being of the wife in her household. We take into account, the simultaneous existence of other marriage payments, flowing in different directions between the stakeholder, that is largely ignored. To assess the impacts of these marital transferson the women's well-being in Senegal, we use a unique survey that enquires separately about the different marriage payments. We highlight the strength of the link between what is given to the bride herself and her welfare, contrary to the looseness of the link with what is given to the family.