The issue of child marriage is not one that is new to Ghana.
The children’s rights-abusing practice is most prevalent in the northern parts of the country, where parents and family members secure better livelihoods for themselves by marrying their girl children below 18 years to mostly older and richer men for money.
The Tizze community in the Jirapa/Lambussie district in the Upper West region is one of the areas ActionAid Ghana and UNICEF is implementing the End Child Marriage project. This is because the community has a high rate of child marriage.
In the Upper West Region alone, ActionAid Ghana’s Community-Based Anti-Violence Team (COMBAT) has rescued 126 girls from child marriages and sent them back to school.
Trained by the Ghana Police Service and the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU), COMBAT has rescued dozens of girls from child marriages, as well as prevented and reported cases of rights infringements and domestic violence to the appropriate authorities.
COMBAT consists of community members who volunteer to be human rights watchdogs in their communities, which usually lack effective state and social protection amenities.
However, despite advocacy efforts, girls continue to be married off at very young ages.
According to David Dakurah, a member of the 3-district (Jirapa, Sissala East and Lambussie) Community Based Anti-Violence Team, as at the end of January 2016 at least 4 cases of teenage pregnancies had been reported.
This, he says, sets the precedent for child marriages.
Parents and elders of the community, after finding out a young woman has been impregnated, force her to get married or get ostracised.
“That is the problem we are facing now. When a man decides to marry a young girl and her parents and community refuse, they simply get her pregnant so she is forced to marry him.” David says.
The young girls have very limited options; get married, get disowned by family members or get an abortion.
With little knowledge about rights and control over their bodies, as well as the stigmatisation that comes with seeking the services of sexual and reproductive health care centres, the latter is an option that the young girls rarely consider.
Without any means of economic freedom, little education and dependence on parents who are already living in poverty, it is therefore no surprise that these pregnant children choose marriage.
By strengthening the capacity of women to enhance their economic freedom through education, provision of skills training and sensitisation, ActionAid Ghana and partners believe that children and the communities can begin to see child marriages for what it truly is - an infringement and abuse of the rights of the child and a contributory factor to the cycle of poverty that plagues communities.
An effect of child marriage is on their education – or the lack of.
When these girls end up in the homes of the men who impregnated them, education comes to a halt – if it was there to begin with.
The numbers don’t lie.
In 2013, the Ministry of Education released the Education Sector Performance Report.
According to the report, although the number of females that enrolled in Senior High Schools increased to 45.9%, completion rate is almost 6% higher for boys than for girls. (p. 54) with pass rates higher for boys than girls in each of the four core subjects.
Also, with child marriage comes pregnancies.
Following marriage, the responsibilities of girls shift from that of education to motherhood and care takers, the result being a high number of girls following forced marriages or early pregnancies become school drop-outs.
When these girls are forced into marriages, they encounter life threatening complications during pregnancies, with maternal and infant mortality among teenage pregnancies very high, especially since prenatal services and access to it are limited or non-existent within these rural communities.
Those who survive pregnancies are immediately thrust into motherhood – children become mothers to babies.
In this highly patriarchy system, the “young women” are heavily burdened with doing unpaid care work and have little time to invest in economic activities that will earn them income to enhance their livelihoods, thus the spiral of poverty continues.
Juliana Yeng, 26, says she dropped out of school when she was 17 after getting pregnant.
It’s been close to a decade since she was married off yet it is only now that she is undergoing training as an apprentice at a smock-making shop. Her youngest child can be seen in the distance playing with other children under her watchful gaze.
She still lives with her husband.
Ophelia Bayuo is a teenager who is visibly with child.
According to her, she is 6 months pregnant but would not disclose her age.
The challenge with gathering accurate data on child marriage is the inability and/or unwillingness of girls to disclose or track their ages.
In the rural communities, children are usually born in the comfort of the home, with the assistance of a traditional midwife and so most girls do not have birth certificates.
Also, to guarantee registration so as to access essential health care services offered by the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), community members tend to inflate or decrease their ages.
This is one of the numerous hurdles that confronts effective and reliable data collection that will inform the success of various interventions and programmes targeted at promoting education and preventing child marriages.
ActionAid Ghana’s work on the 2 year End Child Marriage project is focused on preventing the act altogether however we do not fixate so much on prevention that we ignore the ‘cure’- helping marginalised women to be empowered and to live a life of dignity.
By tackling the issue of unpaid care work, ActionAid Ghana hopes to give women like Juliana a fighting chance and an escape route out of poverty.
We, along with our partners, provide facilities such as kindergartens, education on improving farm yields at lower costs through Climate Resilient Sustainable Agriculture (CRSA) practices, building of water facilities close to communities to enhance ease in accessing water and educating men on sharing the responsibilities of unpaid care work.
In the Tizze community, ActionAid Ghana’s newly constructed Early Childhood Development Centre (ECDC) will give women like Juliana Yeng and Ophelia Bayuo the opportunity to invest their time into income generating activities whiles offering their children an early chance of getting a good education to ensure they have a chance at breaking the cycle of poverty.
Deborah Lomotey
Communications Officer
ActionAid Ghana
The early childhood development centre in the Tizze Community will help reduce unpaid care work load on women
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