Climate change is driving child marriage – a plea to donors and funders to act

By Dua Kazimoto - Firelight Program Assistant in Child and Adolescent Rights

As a program staffer working to support Firelight’s grantee-partners in child and adolescent rights, l had a recent opportunity to meet with our partners and their communities in Malawi. These grantee-partners are either supporting community-driven systems change to address child, early and forced marriage or supporting community-driven approaches to adolescent pregnancy.

Born and raised in Tanzania, I have travelled to many parts of our beautiful continent but I had never been to Malawi. As I began the preparations for my site visits, l was filled with a lot of excitement. In my mind, l had the picture of the Africa I know “full of vegetation and green everywhere.” I was even looking forward to having plenty of my favorite snack - fresh roasted mealies. Alas! How little I knew…

Southern Malawi is predominantly dry with one rainy season running from October to April with a harvest period between March and April. Due to change in climate and environmental degradation, some areas experience long spells of dry season that result in vulnerable households experiencing food gaps. Families will harvest very little and this is usually not sufficient to meet household food needs. And as the climate crisis escalates, this problem is getting worse – not better.

The visits to our grantee-partners were eye opening for me. I got a first-hand experience of the good work that our partners and their communities are doing in addressing the root causes of child marriage and teen pregnancies and how saw well their work can lead to collective, long-term change.

But the site visits also helped me to see the magnitude of climate-driven poverty in Malawi and its role in the root causes of child marriages and teenage pregnancies.

I was shocked to walk over such dry, bare land, not spotting anything green. One question that ran through my mind was “How do these people survive?” It was traumatizing to walk into people’s households and there was no sign of food or even someone starting a fire to prepare something, even though our visits were conducted close to lunch time. Eager to learn, I couldn’t help but ask some of our partners about the situation and the economic activities that take place in their areas. Some indicated that families relied on farming but due to prolonged drought, the harvests were very low such that families would have very little to save for the dry days. Most of the families l interacted with during the visits only survive on one meal per day. Some said they rely on selling charcoal which involves cutting down trees and goes back to contributing to climate change, soil erosion, desertification and the list continues…

I was lucky to have an interaction with a group of adolescent girls who were married early, along with some young mothers who have since gone back to school. And one of the issues that kept coming up as a driver of both, was hunger as a result of poverty. They all shared similar stories as to why they got married - poverty and low levels of economic development pushed them into relationships and marriages where they were hoping for a better life that, in the end, never was. The girls shared stories of how they would leave home for school in the morning on an empty stomach and come home after a long walk to an empty table again. Living in these hard conditions and having to walk long distances to and from school, they would meet young men or sometimes older men on the way who would bribe them with money in exchange for sex and they would end up getting pregnant. Others still would opt to get married to get out of poverty.

Environmental stewardship is a long tradition in Africa. But colonial ignorance of traditional practices, along with extraction, exploitation and restrictive colonial rules paved the way for poor environmental and agricultural practices in many countries. And with a small economy to begin with, the situation for farmers and for the environment in Malawi has only gotten worse.

As a mother of a 9 year old girl, my heart bled seeing girls as young as 12, who were once married and are now young mothers. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Many discussions before and after COP26 last month centered around emissions controls and CO2 reductions. But sustainable land use and re-forestation are as equally important to communities in countries such as Malawi. And they need to be seen as part of any plan to support adolescent girls’ rights. If poverty due to food scarcity is driving child marriage then we must support communities to address it. Too often, with issues like child marriage, we go straight to conversations about sexual and reproductive health or better training for adolescents and parents. But communities and families and girls are telling us that it is also hunger and economic sustainability that must be addressed.

Communities must be supported to address the environment and to build sustainable agriculture in any plan to support long-term futures for adolescent girls. We should not ignore the intersectional challenges of health, adultism, power and patriarchy but we must honor what these adolescent girls are telling us and support them and their families to change their economic future. And in a place like Malawi, that means supporting better environmental and farming practices.

During my trip, I was able to collect a lot of good memories - including the strength, initiative and humbleness of the people in Malawi - but I also took with me the faces of those innocent girls who are denied a range of human rights because of poverty and the memories of the dry brown soil that risks failing them every crop season.

I hope that funders and policy makers – as they continue to think about our climate crisis – can also support the realization of environmental and agricultural sustainability for the rights of adolescent girls and that those who are funding the fight against child marriage can also see that the challenge has environmental roots which we ignore at our peril.