KOIDU – The man first caught a glimpse of Marie Kamara as she ran with her friends past his house near the village primary school. Soon after, he proposed to the fifth-grader.
“I’m going to school now. I don’t want to get married and stay in the house,” she told him.
But the pressures of a global pandemic on this remote corner of Sierra Leone were greater than the wishes of a schoolgirl. Nearby mining operations had slowed with the global economy. Business fell off at her stepfather’s tailoring shop, where outfits he had sewn now gathered dust. The family needed money.
Her suitor was a small-scale miner in his mid-20s, but his parents could provide rice for Marie’s four younger sisters and access to their watering hole. They could pay cash.
Before long, Marie was seated on a floor mat in a new dress as his family presented hers with 500,000 leones ($50) inside a calabash bowl along with the traditional kola nut.
“The day they paid for me was on a Friday and then I went to his house to stay,” she says flatly, adding that at least now she gets to eat something twice a day.
Many countries had made progress against such traditional and transactional marriages of girls in recent decades, but COVID-19’s economic havoc has caused significant backsliding: The United Nations estimates that hardships resulting from COVID-19 will drive 13 million more girls to marry before the age of 18.
Though most such marriages take place in secret, Save the Children estimates that this year alone, nearly half a million more girls under 18 are at risk of being married off worldwide, most in Africa and Asia, but also in the Middle East. One aid organization said staffers in a remote corner of Sierra Leone overheard a relative offering up a girl as young as 8 for marriage earlier this year. When chastised, the grandmother later denied doing so.
In most cases, needy parents receive a dowry for their daughter — a bit of land or livestock that can provide income, or cash and a promise to take over financial responsibility for the young bride. The girl, in turn, takes on the household chores of her husband’s family and often farm work too.
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This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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In pre-pandemic Jordan, only about 10% of girls were married before the age of 18, a much lower percentage than in Africa or South Asia. The number, though, was greater among Palestinian and Syrian refugees there and they are ever more vulnerable, according to the Girls Not Brides organization.
“Sadly, we have seen an increase in child marriage in refugee camps since the beginning of the pandemic as families struggle to cope,” said Tanya Chapuisat, the UNICEF representative for Jordan.
India’s harsh lockdown to contain the virus in late March caused millions of impoverished migrants to lose their jobs in cities and many…
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