Half of all families in the African nation of Sierra Leone include a mother who got married before age 18. Sierra Leone is one of the ten poorest countries on Earth. But that isn’t stopping Sierra Leone from outlawing child marriage.
Sierra Leone’s parliament has approved a law banning child marriage in a development lauded by activists as a major win for children’s rights.
The law criminalizes marrying girls under 18 years of age. It also prescribes jail terms of up to 15 years for offenders.
One-third of all girls are married before their 18th birthday in the west African country, according to UNICEF.
The country is home to 800,000 child brides, 400,000 of whom were married before age 15, the UN body says.
Often due to poverty, many girls in Sierra Leone fail to stay in school. They are then married off by their families in a bid to improve their financial situations or to pay off debt.
African nations that pass such bans often don’t enforce them vigorously. Partly, they pass such bans to make international organizations approve of them, and keep foreign aid flowing.
Earlier this year, another African country, Zambia, banned marriage below age 18. That was a big change, because 1.7 million of Zambia’s 20 million people were child brides, and 400,000 Zambians got married before age 15. Zambia is a landlocked, mostly rural country deep in south central Africa. Parliaments in several other African countries have also recently banned marriage below age 18.
Zambia is a signatory to international agreements banning marriage among minors — such as the Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC), the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC), and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol) that all categorically state the minimum age of marriage as 18, without any exceptions
By banning child marriage, Zambia joins six other nearby countries in southern Africa, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, and Zimbabwe, that mandate a minimum age of 18 for marriage for both boys and girls with no exceptions — not even when the bride and groom’s parents consent to the marriage.
