Africa-Press – Mozambique. The NGO Plan International warned on Friday that the armed conflict in northern Mozambique has increased the vulnerability of children to early marriages, at a time when the country is among the 10 with the highest rate of early marriages in the world.
“We are finding that there is a very high risk of premature unions and pregnancies among girls who are in reception centres,” Nina Yang, a gender specialist at the NGO told Lusa.
The findings are the result of a rapid assessment carried out this year by the organisation in reception centres in Nampula and Cabo Delgado provinces, which take in displaced people fleeing armed violence in northern Mozambique.
According to Yang, the risk of increased cases of premature pregnancies and unions is a result of the vulnerability of the girls sheltered in those places.
“Besides the risk of an increase in premature marriages, what we see are cases of ‘transactional sex’, in which girls get sexually involved with people as a way of surviving in those places,” she said.
On the other hand, according to Nina Yang, reception centres do not have mechanisms to ensure that displaced girls continue studying, which once again exposes girls to early marriages.
“Many have been integrated into primary and secondary education, but these integrations have not taken into account school materials and the distances between reception centres and schools. This ends up raising school dropout rates among displaced children”, she added.
In Mozambique, customs in many cases have legitimised early marriages, to the extent that in some provinces, even before birth, the girl is promised to a man for various reasons, including the payment of a debt or as a price for services provided by a traditional healer.
The approval of the Law to Prevent and Combat Premature Unions in 2019 promises to change this scenario, but the reality in rural areas remains complex, with official data indicating that 48% of Mozambican girls marry before the age of 18, a situation that for NGOs is aggravated by the inefficient implementation of the legislation, in addition to poverty and customs.
Mozambique is at the top of the list of countries with the highest rates of premature unions, 10th in the world and 2nd in sub-Saharan Africa, after Malawi, according to data from Plan.
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