Addressing Child Marriages At the Community Level
Kanzi is a young 12-year-old girl living in Bulamogi village, in the Kamuli District of Eastern Uganda. She dreams of becoming a doctor. One day after school, she returned home to find her dad with a middle-aged man who was to become her husband. Just like that, she became a housewife and her dreams were shattered.
According to UNICEF, Uganda has the sixteenth highest prevalence rate of child marriage in the world and the tenth highest absolute number of child brides globally at 787,000.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, child marriage rates were impacted by culture and poverty. Kanzi represents just one of the more than 40 percent of all Ugandan girls who are forcefully married off by their parents before their eighteenth birthday. These statistics have nearly doubled during the pandemic as a result of school closures and economic hardships that have led many parents to sell their daughters as a means of economic recovery. This increase in child marriage has also resulted in a precipitous rise in gender-based violence, maternal mortality, child poverty, obstetric fistula cases, and other issues.
Government Efforts to Address Child Marriage in Uganda
Over the past decade, the Ugandan government has tried to address child marriage issue through various policies over the past decade. Initiatives like the National Development Plan emphasized attaining basic education as a key tactic to eliminate child marriage. Additionally, the government passed the Children Act in 2016, which codified rights that granted children autonomy. Because child marriage is often fueled by economic instability, the government also introduced the Operation Wealth Creation initiative to address economic inequities across the country.
Besides Ugandan government efforts, civil society organizations led by United Nations (UN) agencies like UNICEF, UNFPA, and UN Women have led programs focusing on sensitization, advocacy, economic empowerment, and elimination of violence against women and girls. They have also taken on projects to eliminate child, early, and forced marriage by 2030 in line with target 5.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.
So, why do child marriages still persist with all these interventions in place? Many existing approaches do not adequately acknowledge the necessity for local institutions to play a role in eradicating child marriage. There has been a considerable lack of engagement of community-based systems like cultural and religious institutions, self-help groups, and schools in efforts to curtail the problem. This lack of acknowledgement of child marriage as an issue by formal institutions explains why informal marriages, where a girl lives with an older man, are more common than registered civil or religious marriages among all cases of child marriage.
To bridge this gap and better utilize community-based structures to address child marriage, there are two approaches that have been proposed by activists on the ground.
The Home-Based Approach
The home-based approach to tackling child marriage engages community members in self-help groups like Village Savings Loan Associations (VSLAs) and Savings and Credit Co-operatives (Emyooga) who are trained to prevent, report, and follow up on suspected cases. As a group, they report to clan leaders, local chiefs, religious leaders, and/or police. In this approach, these same points of contact are also trained to be goodwill ambassadors who continuously campaign against child marriage during social gatherings.
Because child marriage in Uganda is largely viewed as merely a family or clan issue that does not require the attention of the formal justice system, cases are most commonly settled out of court, even when they are reported to the police. When this happens, designated local leaders can ensure that justice prevails in child marriage cases in the community, thus making it difficult for parents to conspire with child molesters to bribe the police in an effort to sell their children.
This approach can be strengthened by ensuring that all members of an Emyooga are turned into advocates of children’s rights so that the fight against child marriage is streamlined into economic recovery and empowerment efforts. According to a 2017 World Bank study findings, ending child marriage in Uganda could generate USD514 million in earnings and productivity. Given that schools have been closed to curtail the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a home-based approach would be the most effective in addressing the resultant rising cases of child marriages.
The School-Based Approach
Beyond crisis, a school-based approach is another important way to empower the victims of child marriage to become the drivers of the eradication movement. This approach places responsibility on the school administration, education officials, and local government officials, like community development officers and education committees, to address the issue. From headteachers to staff and students, all levels of schools in Uganda would be responsible for providing and studying specific lessons on the topic of child marriage.
Many schools have clubs for music, dance, and drama, among countless other topics. This approach taps into these clubs to empower students by providing sensitivity training and lessons on how to recognize and report suspected cases of child marriage amongst their fellow students. Reports would then be taken to the teacher, club patron, or directly to a headteacher. In collaboration with religious leaders and/or the police, steps can then be taken to resolve the case and make sure that the victim is safe and the culprit is penalized.
Where We Go From Here
Despite Uganda’s considerable shortcomings in ending child marriage due to underutilization of existing community-based systems, there have been successes in using community-based approaches to address other pressing social issues. A school-based initiative called Presidential Initiative on AIDS Strategy for Communication to the Youth (PIASCY) was established in [insert year here] to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since then, HIV/AIDS rates have decreased from 30 percent of the population in the 1980s to 5.7 percent in 2018, according to UNAIDS. Uganda has also been praised as one of the most successful African countries at fighting HIV/AIDS and this success is largely attributed to PIASCY.
Despite the fact that child marriage is deeply entrenched in Uganda’s cultural beliefs, addressing it through the two approaches described above would work to dismantle the customs that frustrate the future dreams of girls. The suggested approaches are relatively easy to implement and cost-effective, making them excellent options for communities and institutions. Additionally, they provide the option for victims to be active participants in the fight for their own rights. Therefore they are replicable, scalable and effective.
Charles Mwanje is a 2020–2021 Global Health Corps Fellow and a Mental Health and Control of Substance Abuse Officer for Uganda’s Ministry of Health.
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