Good morning. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to be here today to talk about child marriage.
Our organization, Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative, is based in Kano, which is in the northwestern part of Nigeria. It's a region that is very conservative and is very patriarchal.
There are lots of issues that women face. There is a low value placed on women. Child marriage is rife, especially in the rural areas more than in the urban areas. Actually in the urban areas it's declining, but in the rural areas it's still very common for girls to be married off at the age of 13, 14, or 15. That's because there's a low value placed on girls.
Poverty is high. There's high illiteracy. There's also ignorance and no appreciation for the value of education, especially for girls.
Our interventions tend to focus on empowering women and girls, providing them with basic literacy, maternal health, and economic empowerment.
For girls, or for mothers especially, we've noticed that when they attend basic literacy programs, they realize that education is very important, and that makes them determined that their daughters should get an education and should finish school.
What we find also is some girls can get enrolled into school, but when they get to secondary school, halfway through they are withdrawn for marriage. Sometimes it is because they have reached the age of puberty. Their bodies are developing, and they are looking mature, and parents would rather have them married off than have them in the public eye, so to speak. They are afraid of the girls bringing shame on the family, that is, maybe having children out of wedlock, or suffering sexual harassment. They would rather marry these girls off.
What we are doing is trying to make them see that as long as girls are not being educated, it creates a whole lot of problems for the girls, for their families and their children, in terms of maternal health risks for the girls. For their children it's malnutrition. Again, it's a vicious cycle because obviously she hasn't been to school, doesn't see the value, so her children don't go to school. All this just continues to perpetuate; it's a vicious cycle.
There are some communities where men don't want their wives to go to hospital because they don't want male doctors or male nurses to examine their wives when they are pregnant. So we say to them that if they don't let their daughters go to school, how can there be female doctors? How can there be female nurses that are going to look after their wives when they are pregnant, when they need to deliver?
In schools you have mostly a lot of male teachers. How can we have female teachers when the girls are not allowed to continue their education and to study any profession of any sort? As long as that's not happening, we are going to continue to have these problems.
This is some of what we do. Of course, it means that girls don't even have access to information, be it on health or anything to do with economic activities.
When they are married, the culture is they cannot go out unless they have permission from their husband, even for maternal health risks. What we find is the woman needs to go to hospital because it's time to have her baby, but the husband is out. Maybe he's out in the fields, or he's travelling out of town. She will not go because she does not have permission from her husband to go to hospital.
If it's a case where she has a problem such as eclampsia, and she's having a fit or something, she dies because they will not let her go to hospital. Her mother-in-law may say, “I had all my children at home so why do you feel you need to go to hospital?” It's also seen as a sign that the woman is not strong. That she had to go to hospital is seen as a failure on her part, especially when it's her first child.
These are all the various issues we come across, so we hold a lot of maternal health education for girls and for women with the basic literacy.
Also, providing them with access to legal aid if there is domestic violence is another issue, especially for young girls who suffer with this. The girls and women themselves tend to have low self-esteem. We try to do life skills education to make them realize that they have value and they should see themselves that way.