Efforts to eliminate child marriage underway
The Ghana Police Service and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) are leading efforts to find solutions that will eliminate the harmful traditional practice of child marriage in the Volta Region and other parts of the country where the practice is common.
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The project is being spearheaded by the Research and Counselling Foundation for African Migrants (RECFAM) with support from the governments of Ghana and Canada.
It is targeted at identifying victims of early marriages, rescuing them and supporting them to regain their rights.
The initiative also focused on girl’s education, public sensitisation and education, as well as intensification of law enforcement. Two hotlines, 024 240 6544 and 020 019 8548, have also been unveiled to aid reporting of cases for prompt attention.
Statistics
According to research, more than 170,000 children in Ghana get married before they celebrate their 18th birthday annually.
Ghana falls within the category of nations with the highest prevalence rate.
A United Nations Population Fund- NCCE report shows that the Volta, Brong Ahafo, Upper East and Upper West Regions were leading the regional distribution with more than one in every four girls going into marriages.
The 2012 population census report indicated that 3,254,007 of the population were children aged 12 and above and out of the number, 176,103, representing 5.4 per cent were married.
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According to RECFAM, the situation was more disturbing when it came to the regional data as one in every four girls got married prior to turning 18 in most part of the country.
The Nkwanta North and South districts topped the district distribution in the Volta Region with 55 and 23 per cent each of reported cases as against nine per cent by the remaining districts put together.
To change the trend, a team against child marriages was at Pibila, a farming community near Damanko, one of the high-risk communities in the Nkwanta North District, for a sensitisation programme.
In the community, teenage girls are forced into exchange marriages between families and in some cases as payment of debt.
Children, as young as 10, were said to have been pushed into early or forced marriages, depriving them of their rights to education and dignity.
Speaking during an interaction with the community members, the Director of RECFAM, Alfred Mbinglo, charged parents to be responsible for the welfare of their children.
Victim’s story
A 22-year-old woman, Miss Patience Combien, who is a victim, shared her testimony of how she escaped from forced marriage.
Her testimony drew more applause when she told the gathering she had been able to pursue her education and was now a marketing graduate.
The Chairman of the Nkwanta North and South NCCE, Mr Clement Kpega, said the commission, in collaboration with the World Vision, the Domestic Violence Victim Support
Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) and the Department of Social Welfare in the area, had been besieged with overwhelming complaints and called on the chiefs to support initiatives to reduce the menace.
He said perpetrators of child marriage, in their attempt to escape being arrested, were conveying the children to Ghana’s neighbouring country, Togo, to carry out their plans.
He said for most of the perpetrators, child marriage was just a traditional practice that was repeated simply because it had happened for generations and straying from tradition could mean exclusion from the community.
“The impact of child marriage on our development process as a nation is obvious. Child marriage is linked to poverty and impacts national productivity,” he said.
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Forced marriage
Child marriage is a global canker that affects millions of girl-children and it has been estimated that if present trends continue, more than 407,000 girls born between 2005 and 2010 will be married before they attain the age of 18.
Early marriage is also described as one of the issues that contravene the objectives of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by reducing the achievement of the main goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, as well as reducing child mortality.
According to experts,child marriage is a breach of a child's human rights and contrary to international law and is a violation of human rights, which contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.