Sustained effort needed to end child marriage

Child marriage remains a challenge in Ghana. Over the years, governments and development partners have made various commitments and efforts to curb the phenomenon. However, there is little empirical evidence on the predictors, norms and practices surrounding the practice to support their efforts.

According to an August 2020 UNICEF report on Ending Child Marriage: A Profile of Progress in Ghana: Preview of Results, Ghana has made progress, compared to other countries in West and Central Africa. However, it said eliminating child marriage by 2030 would require additional efforts.

Ghana, the report further said, was home to over two million child brides, including currently married girls, along with women who were first married in childhood, and estimated that one in five young women was married or in union before her 18th birthday.

The UNICEF report further states that child marriage is highest in the Northern, Upper East and Volta regions and lowest in the Greater Accra, Ashanti and Brong Ahafo regions.

The majority of young women who married in childhood gave birth as adolescents.

In Ghana, 4.4 and 5.8 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 married by exact age 15 in 2006 and 2011, respectively. In addition, among women aged 20 to 24, the proportion who married before exact age 18 was 22 per cent in 2006 and 21 per cent in 2011.

Child marriage brings girls’ childhood and adolescence to a premature end and imposes adult roles and responsibilities on them before they are physically, psychologically and emotionally prepared to handle them.

We are, therefore, happy that the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and other key stakeholders have developed a National Strategic Framework on Ending Child Marriage in Ghana, which will ensure an effective, well-structured and well-guided collaboration between state and non-state institutions to help end child marriage in the country.

As a violation of human rights, every child has the right to be protected from this harmful practice, which has devastating consequences for individuals and society.

As a form of violence against young girls, it increases their vulnerability to sexual, physical and psychological violence due to the unbalanced power dynamics within marriage.

The Daily Graphic is satisfied that child marriage is now firmly on the global development agenda, and most prominently through its inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 5.3, which aims to eliminate the practice by 2030.

We note that a girl’s risk of child marriage can be influenced by characteristics, including girls who live in rural areas or come from poorer households. Higher proportion of child brides are also found among those with little or no education. Indeed, child marriage increases with less wealth and less education.

Undoubtedly, various socio-economic and cultural factors, such as education, teenage pregnancy, poverty and cultural norms such as betrothal marriage, exchange of girls for marriage and pressure from significant others are some of the drivers of child marriage.

It is for this reason, we believe, that efforts to curb child marriage should be geared towards retention of girls in school, curbing teenage pregnancy, empowering girls economically, enforcing laws on child marriage in Ghana, as well as designing tailored advocacy programmes to educate key stakeholders and adolescent girls and boys on the consequences of child marriage.

We would also like to remind policy makers that child marriage undermines the fundamental human rights of children and violates Article 16(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.”

It also violates Article 16 of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) that women should have the same right as men to “freely choose a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent”.

What this means is that the practice of child marriage needs to be criminalised.