When pressure of poverty leads to child marriage

Parents in Nyakoi village in eastern Uganda feel pressured by poverty to marry off young daughters in order to receive “bride price” payment from the husband’s family.

The usual price is five cows, or the equivalent of US$600.

Grace Aseku was married off by her parents when she was 14 to Ijoot Julius, who was 16. Five years later, the couple has four hungry children.

“None of my children has tasted milk since they stopped breastfeeding”, says Grace. “After weaning, I resort to giving them porridge made from sorghum, which is also hard to get,” says Grace

Occasionally she obtains a little cassava or picks greens from nearby bushland.

The problem is that the family has to survive by farming an area of a quarter of an acre, which does not provide enough food.

Her husband sometimes earns extra cash or food by working for one of the handful of better-off farmers in neighbouring villages, but Grace complains that he often wastes money on alcohol.

Grace’s plight is not unusual. Young girls are not ready to handle the responsibilities of married life. Many become victims of domestic violence and are at high risk of giving birth to premature children and of exposure to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Treated as men’s property, they often suffer separation, divorce or abandonment.

If they are thrown out by their husbands and re-marry – often as a second or third wife - they are even more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS infection and domestic violence.

Sometimes they return to their parents for support, thus completing the cycle of deprivation.

Shortage of land and the lack of alternative jobs lie at the heart of the problem.

“We simply cannot grow enough food”, says Dinnah Loy Atekit, a widow who is finding it increasingly difficult to feed her family of 10.

By Rebecca Musoke