Zambia grapples with problem of child marriages

The rescuing of a 13-year-old girl from a forced marriage in north Zambia recently has ignited calls for invigorated efforts to put an end to child marriages in the southern African nation.
The incident, as well as other similar ones of girls being retrieved from forced early marriages, is a clear indication that Zambia is still far from winning the battle against the social disease.
The girl was retrieved from her marriage by education campaigners after her parents married her off to a 21-year-old man and was found to be pregnant. In southern Zambia, four girls, also aged 13, were reported to have been married off by their parents.
Despite the Zambian law prohibiting sex with girls under the age of 16, stories of young girls being married off indicates that the law needed to be stiffened.
Women and girl rights campaigners believe that current efforts to tackle the problem have not yielded any tangible results, hence the need for concerted efforts from all stakeholders to put an end to the vice.
The situation has been worsened by the fact that marrying off girls is deeply embedded in cultural beliefs of most rural areas of Zambia where girls are seen as a source of income. The situation was further worsened by the high poverty levels in rural parts of Zambia.
Campaigners are now calling for stiffening of laws to clamp down on the problem and leading the campaign is the country's First Lady Christine Kaseba-Sata.
She said at the launch of a national campaign to end child marriages that if such a problem is not tackled now, an estimated 453,000 young girls born between 2005 and 2010 in Zambia would be married or in a union before the age of 18 years by 2030.
Speaking at a regional symposium on ending child marriages, Kaseba-Sata said it was unacceptable that about 42 percent of girls are being married off or impregnated before they reach 18 years.
The high number of child marriages was a crisis which should be fought with the same vigor the country used in fighting the HIV/ AIDS pandemic, she said. Zambia has reduced HIV prevalence rate from 25 percent to the current 14.3 percent.
Increased awareness programs on the dangers of the vice were needed, she added.
To enhance the fight against the vice, the Zambian first lady believes that involvement of traditional leaders is cardinal because the trend is deeply rooted in the country's culture where marrying off young girls is seen as a normal practice.
Traditional leaders in various parts of the country have enhanced their efforts to end child marriages in their chiefdoms. Leaders in the south have teamed up, warning that all men that have married under-age girls have their days numbered.
These traditional leaders are concerned that that cases of child marriages had continued unabated and were hindering government efforts to empower the girl-child with education.
The Forum for African Women Educationists in Zambia, an organization promoting girl education, was concerned that forcing under-age girls into early marriages was depriving them of an opportunity to be educated and that it was also a human rights issue.
The organization was currently conducting programs to help people understand the importance of a girl child acquiring an education.
On the other hand, the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is currently supporting a national situation analysis on child marriages in Zambia which will contribute to the mapping of organizations working on child marriage and eventually towards the development of a detailed program document which will bring about national strategy on child marriages.
The Washington-based International Center for Research on Women estimates that one third of the world's girls are married before the age of 18 and that if the trend continues, 142 million girls will be married before their 18th birthday over the next decade.