23 percent underage girls in Nepal get married

November 19, 2012 - An annual preliminary report of Nepal’s Ministry of Health and Population showed that at least 23 percent girls in the country get married at the age of 15-19 years as against the legal age of 20 for both sexes. This represents small progress compared with last year’s 25 percent, Dr. Praveen Mishra, secretary of the ministry said on Saturday. The annual report regarding child marriage rates of 2012 is expected to be released early next year. “Early marriage needs to be stopped because it not only affects girl’s education but also their health and overall career development in the future,” Dr. Mishra said, adding their biggest challenge is the family’s attitude towards educating their daughters. Suman Tuladhar, education specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund, Nepal (UNICEF-Nepal) said there is the need to strongly lobby against early marriage, but they are hampered by a very poor monitoring system to implement the existing law. Many rural families in Nepal marry off their daughters at the age of 11-13 because their parents think that the older a girl gets the higher the dowry will be. “Child marriage is the extreme denial of children’s rights. Many girls suffer from abusive marriages as they are married to older boys,” said Dibya Dawadi, deputy director general at the Department of Education under the Ministry of Education. After marriage, such girls rarely come back to school and even if they do, their performance are recorded very poor, Dawadi said, adding that early marriage negatively impacts the girls’ self-confidence. Child marriage not only defied them from their education, it often made them vulnerable to a cycle of discrimination, domestic violence and abuse, said Helen Sherpa, social activist and member of the World Education, an international nongovernmental organization (NGO). Tuladhar said the UNICEF’s world report on child marriage in 2011 showed that 51 percent of Nepalese get married in their early age. Nepal’s 2006 demographic and health survey found that among Nepalese women of the 20-49 age groups, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.