“Marrying off daughters means fewer mouths to feed,” written in a Reuters article, and the reason for forced marriages to be common practice in Burkina Faso.
Home to at least 3 million child brides, Burkina Faso has reported over 650 cases of forced marriage and 2,200 child marriages between 2019 and 2021, and these are only the ones they know of.
According to UNICEF’s 2021 profile on child marriage in Burkina Faso, the country has not shown any evidence of reducing its child marriage rate for the last 25 years. The practice of child marriage remains prevalent in Burkina Faso, with around 52% of girls being married in childhood.
Although forced marriages are illegal in Burkina Faso, the presence of violence and, as such, poverty has subjected many young girls to child marriage. A recent event that has also made it increasingly difficult to promote the abolishment of child marriage was the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 not only created more economic insecurity to feed and care for families but also led to the closure of several schools. Data from UNICEF shows that education is a powerful tool to protect children against child marriages. However, more than 2,000 schools were reportedly closed due to the pandemic, which may “push girls towards marriage since school is no longer an option.”
In the Sahel, UNICEF reports that “young women with no education are 10 times more likely to have married in childhood than their peers with more than a secondary education.” This statistic is even more concerning when discovering that 95% of adolescent girls that are married in the Sahel are not attending school at all.
7 in 10 girls were child brides in the Sahel, with numbers being much higher in Central Sahel where Burkina Faso is located.
The World Bank found that 41.4% of individuals in Burkina Faso lived below the national poverty line in 2018, with an additional 250,000 Burkinabé pushed into poverty by 2021. Poverty-stricken, families have resorted to forcing their daughters into marriages. And in desperation, many daughters have abandoned their families to escape these marriages and to seek refuge where they can to go back to school.
Kimberly, Andy
