Rights group urge respect of girl rights
Early November a mother in the Kwite farming area in Mangwe district made headlines when she gave away her 13-year-old daughter to a fellow farm worker for a measly $100-bride price.
Watmore Makokoba
Justifying what a local daily described a “selling off the child,” the widowed mother said she was struggling, with her meager wage as a farmhand, to look after her offspring, let alone pay the girl’s school fees.
Anonymous whistleblowers who were touched by the girl’s plight alerted the police who rescued her after she has spent a month as “wife” to a 23-year-old “husband.”
She counts herself among the lucky few.
Many others are enduring forced marriages and motherhood before their time after being married off by parents or guardians to husbands they did not choose.
Often the parents or guardians are driven by poverty to marry off minor girls or while in some stances under-age girls chose to enter into early marriage to escape poverty or abuse at home.
At 16, Sarah Muchemwa (not her real name) is supposed to be in secondary school but her dreams for a future as a career woman were dashed when her father lost his job in July, a victim of the spate of lay-offs in the wake of a supreme court ruling which allowed companies to retrench without packages after giving workers three months’ notice.
Faced with financial woes at home, Muchemwa gave in to pressure from her boyfriend hoping to escape the poverty back home by getting into early marriage. But the boyfriend Muchemwa saw as her sole saviour only added to her worries by making her pregnant and dumping her.
Getting into an early marriage was not Muchemwa plan but facing the dilemma of living in poverty and eloping with her boyfriend, she found the latter a better option.
But her boyfriend dumped her after she fell pregnant and joined hundreds of other youth living on illegal gold panning.
The Zimbabwe National Statistical Agency (ZIMSTAT) 2014 Multi Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) report says Zimbabwean women aged between 15 and 19 years were married while 34 percent of women aged between 20 and 24 years had married before 18 years.
Of these, 14 percent were from urban areas while 30 percent were from rural areas
The report attributed this to cultural practices, poverty, lack of education, being orphaned, the flawed legislation regarding the minimum age of sexual consent among other issues.
Photo credit: http://www.globoport.hu
According to Plan International, young women are the first victims of economic instability throughout the world as they represent the majority of the 628 million young people aged 15-24 who have neither a job nor an education.
In its 2012 repot, the United Nations reports that one in three girls in the developing world will be married by her 18th birthday–that’s 14 million per year or nearly 39,000 girls every day.
Katswe Sisterhood, a movement of young women fighting for the full attainment of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) says ending child marriages is possible though not easy.
“The complex mix of cultural and economic factors means there is not a single, simple solution,” the group said in a recent statement. “But, through partnership, long-term programming and a willingness to learn from our successes and failures, we can end child marriage in a generation.”
ROOTS a non-governmental organization which advocates for economic and social justice is currently in campaigns against early marriages focusing on rural and remote areas in Mashonaland Central such as Shamva.
On the day of the African Child on June 16, Roots held a workshop at Case Farm in Shamva. Which revealed that people in remote regions lack knowledge despite the assumptions that everyone knows the risks and disadvantages of early marriages.
Representing the local council, a counselor who identified herself as Ms Murehwa advised parents not to sell their children because of poverty.
“Because of poverty, some parents give away their daughters into early or forced marriage in exchange for gold, a person’s life is worth more than everything, even gold, early marriages are leading to domestic violence and in most cases these marriages do not last”, said Murehwa.
According to Real Open Opportunities for Transformation Support (ROOTS), child marriages are prevalent in poor farming communities and in areas where illegal gold panning is the main source of income.
In July, Zimbabwe became the eighth country to join the African Union campaign to end child marriage in Africa. In her keynote address, Zimbabwe’s first lady, Grace Mugabe, called on the Justice Ministry to revise Zimbabwe’s laws to set the minimum marriage age at 18.
Human Rights Watch senior researcher Dehwa Mavhinga recently challenged the county`s president to awaken to the call to end poverty which is playing an major role in fuelling child marriages
“President Mugabe and his government should not ignore the suffering of hundreds of thousands of girls in Zimbabwe who are robbed of their futures through early marriage,” Mavhinga said. “The government should reform its laws, and ensure that the minimum age of 18 for marriage is applied across the country, including by religious denominations.” Mavhinga said.
Section 78 of the constitution says that anyone who has attained the age of 18 has the right to found a family and that no one should be compelled to marry against their will, however section 78 does not set 18 as the minimum age for marriage.
Early marriages are associated with trauma and health complications such as obstetric fistula.
According to the World Health Organization, obstetric fistula is a hole between the vagina and rectum or bladder that is caused by prolonged obstructed labor, leaving a woman incontinent of urine faeces or both.
