Jobs and paid-for schooling can keep Tanzanian girls from early marriages

Many girls in Sub-Saharan Africa drop out of school because of the costs involved. This, however, makes getting married at a young age look like a more attractive and viable option than continuing their studies.

17 November 2017 Laura Stark, University of Jyväskylä 0 Comment

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Sub-Saharan Africa is home to four of the top five countries in early marriage – or child marriage – rates: Niger, Chad, Mali and Central African Republic.

Despite decades of campaigning to restrict or forbid early marriage, little has changed for the world’s poorest women. The percentage of these particularly poor women who were in a conjugal union by the age of 18 has remained unchanged for the continent as a whole since 1990 – and has actually risen in East Africa.

Early marriage appears to have absolutely no benefits. It accelerates population growth and decreases women’s participation in the labour force. It also reduces a country’s overall national earnings. Girls who marry before they turn 18 are at greater risk of childbirth-related complications that are the leading cause of death worldwide for girls aged 15 to 19.

But what’s not often reported in the media is that some girls themselves want to marry early. I discovered this when I conducted interviews with 171 people, most of them Muslim women, in two low-income neighbourhoods in Tanzania’s capital city Dar es Salaam.

The poorest girls and women see themselves as having few possibilities to earn an income for themselves.

Even before they marry, girls from poor families must often resort to premarital sexual relations with their boyfriends who provide food and money.

For many low-income Tanzanians, it’s also normal to start thinking about marriage at roughly age 15. Established cultural expectations in many ethnic groups suggest that adulthood begins at age 15 or 16.

Yet even those girls and parents who would like to delay marriage often have little choice because of poverty and the fact that women in slum neighbourhoods have fewer opportunities to earn an income than men do.

Creating more opportunities for young women and girls to work and earn money is one possible solution to early marriages. Subsidising secondary education to keep poorer girls in school for longer is another.