Drive To End Child Marriage Faces Long Road, Multiple Obstacles

In the border town of Chaman, in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, a wedding photograph began circulating online this month showing a 3-year-old girl dressed as a bride beside a groom in his 60s. Within days, the provincial government had ordered an investigation, and police arrested the girl’s father, Abdul Bari.What made the case rare wasn’t the marriage itself; it was that anyone was held to account for it. Balochistan banned child marriage outright only last November, and most unions involving girls even younger than this toddler never surface publicly, let alone trigger an arrest.On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring November 27 the International Day for the Elimination of Child, Early and Forced Marriage, an effort led by Sierra Leone and pushed for years by the advocacy group Just Rights for Children. Police arrest 36-year-old Abdul Bari for trying to marry off his 3-year-old daughter to a 60-year-old man in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on September 17, 2026. Via XThe vote came as fresh figures confirm how far the world sits from a goal of ending the practice by 2030: an estimated 640 million girls and women alive today were married before turning 18, and roughly 12 million more are added to that count every year — about 23 a minute, according to UN estimates.The worst of it plays out in a handful of countries. Nigertops nearly every global ranking, with marriage claiming roughly three in four girls before 18 and close to 30 percent before they turn 15. The Central African Republic and Chad hover close behind, each above 60 percent, with Bangladesh not far off at just over half.Because several of the worst-affected countries, including Niger and Bangladesh, are majority Muslim, the practice is often assumed to be rooted in Islamic custom or law. Treating the issue as a religious matter, though, misses what is actually driving it, according to those tracking the demographic data behind it, observers caution.“Poverty, insecurity and entrenched ideas about the roles of women and girls often shape whether a girl marries young far more than simply the dominant religion of her country,” the founder of More to Her Story, Sarah Little, tells The New York Sun.If religion isn’t the common thread, then what is? And why can’t researchers who track this issue for a living even agree on which countries belong at the top of the list?A Crisis Concentrated in a Handful of CountriesThe confusion starts with Yemen. The country has anchored global coverage of child marriage since 2008, when a 9-year-old named Nujood Ali became one of the first child brides to successfully seek her own divorce, drawing worldwide attention to a country where Human Rights Watch put the number of girls married before age 18 near 52 percent.That number predates the civil war that broke out in 2014, and Yemen has had no comprehensive national survey since — meaning the statistic that focused global attention on the issue is now well over a decade old.Even close observers disagree on the finer points of which nations sit at the top of the list today. The commonly cited claim that Yemen ranks among the worst offenders, driven upward by more than a decade of civil war, does not hold up against the primary tracking data.“According to Girls Not Brides, child marriage is most common in Niger, Central African Republic, Chad, and South Sudan,” an associate professor in the Department of Equity, Ethics, and Policy at McGill University, Alissa Koski, tells the Sun. “Yemen is not in the top 20 countries,” a ranking reiterated by Girls Not Brides’ own atlas of global prevalence data.Ms. Koski also notes that the practice is far from confined to poor or war-torn nations, or to any single faith.“Child marriage happens worldwide, including in wealthier countries like the United States and Canada,” she says. “The practice is not restricted to any specific religious groups — it happens among all major religions.”The disconnect points to a larger problem: Countries at war are often the hardest to survey so that data can lag years behind reality on the ground, and a country can drop out of the rankings simply because no one has been able to conduct a count.Poverty, Not Scripture, Behind the NumbersNiger and Bangladesh are overwhelmingly Muslim, the Central African Republic is majority Christian, and Nepal, with one of the world’s highest rates, is majority Hindu. India, home to the largest single population of child brides on earth, sees the practice among Hindu and Muslim families alike.Nor is there consistency between countries governed by similar religious traditions. Algeria and Libya both root family law in Islamic jurisprudence and set some of the highest minimum marriage ages in the Muslim world — 19 in Algeria, 20 in Libya. Both report child marriage rates under 5 percent, according to the OECD’s Social Institutions and Gender Index.Lebanon, by contrast, has no single civil minimum age at all; the question is left to 15 separate religious courts, Christian and Muslim alike, some of which permit girls younger than 15 to marry.The reverse pattern turns up in majority-Christian countries with weak enforcement and high poverty. In Mozambique, 48 percent of girls marry before 18, and in Malawi, the rate was 39 percent in the most recent data — both among the highest in the world.What researchers who study the issue consistently find instead is a simpler predictor: Household income and a girl’s access to a classroom explain the variation far better than the religion practiced in her country.What ties the worst-hit countries together is a shared set of pressures on households with daughters and no money, a dynamic playing out on the ground in poor communities from the Sahel to South Asia.“Poverty is the biggest driver, but culture, more so religion, can be a driving factor,” war photographer Jake Simkin tells The Sun.Mr. Simkin observes that the practice often functions as a transaction between families struggling to survive.“Often with poverty-stricken countries, a daughter is given away to strengthen the families to much richer families,” he explains, highlighting that in some communities marrying off a daughter can cancel a debt owed to a wealthier household.Aid workers who sit across the table from these families see the same calculation play out.“Household economic insecurity can force parents to make difficult choices, and in some circumstances, parents perceive that marrying a girl early can produce increased economic security for both the child and the larger household,” the senior technical adviser for child protection at World Vision, Matthew Stephens, tells The Sun.Mr. Stephens, whose organization operates as a Christian humanitarian group, says “no family should be forced to make the impossible choice between feeding a child and marrying them early.”Gender inequality compounds the effect, according to Ms. Koski, especially when families decide which child gets to keep going to school.“When families have limited financial resources, they are more likely to spend those resources on boys,” she explains. “In the absence of opportunities to attend school, marriage may seem like a way forward for girls.”Where Keeping Girls in School Is WorkingSchooling helps push back against that pressure; however, it doesn’t erase it.“Each additional year of secondary school reduces a girl’s likelihood of child marriage and teenage pregnancy by about six percentage points,” Ms. Little says.She cautions, however, that a diploma alone does not free a girl from the pressure to marry.“A girl can finish secondary school or even university and still face intense pressure to marry immediately afterward and have children,” she continues. “Education should open up a girl’s future, but too often it becomes a holding pattern before the same expectations and pressures around marriage and motherhood take over.”World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization that runs child-protection and development programs in dozens of countries, has built one of the larger interventions around that same insight. Its Big Dream to End Child Marriage initiative, launched in 2019 in countries including Kenya and Bangladesh, aims to directly reach more than 660,000 people by 2030, including close to 170,000 girls.“Our experience proves that keeping a girl in school is one of the most effective tools we have in delaying the age of marriage,” Mr. Stephens says, underscoring that roughly 122 million girls are currently out of school worldwide. “The problem isn’t that girls don’t want to learn; it’s that poverty, crisis, and discrimination create barriers that fall hardest on them.”He also points to school fees that force families to pull daughters out first, and the hours many girls spend fetching water rather than sitting in a classroom.Still, money for schooling is one thing. Money for the broader fight against child marriage is another matter entirely.A new report from Girls Not Brides and the Girls First Fund found that only 0.025 percent of official development assistance went to programs focused specifically on ending child marriage even before recent cuts to foreign aid budgets. That is less than a dollar a year for every girl considered at risk. At the current pace, UNICEF estimates it would take roughly 300 years to eliminate child marriage worldwide.The new UN observance day, set for November 27, gives advocates a fixed date each year to press governments for the money and political attention. The General Assembly now designates more than 200 such observance days for causes ranging from tuberculosis to migratory birds.Researchers who track funding for child marriage say awareness campaigns of this kind rarely bring a corresponding rise in the money committed to their cause. Where governments have acted only through legislation, Ms. Koski adds, the results have been thin.“Many countries have changed their laws to prohibit marriage before the age of 18, but it is not clear those laws are having the intended effect, especially in places where child marriage is normalized and where enforcement is weak,” she says.

Drive To End Child Marriage Faces Long Road, Multiple Obstacles

Drive To End Child Marriage Faces Long Road, Multiple Obstacles

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