According to UNICEF’s latest report, Nigeria will have the highest number of child brides by year 2050 with the way underage girls are married off.

“In Africa, Nigeria is expected to have the largest absolute number of child brides. The country has seen a decline in child marriage of about one per cent per year over the past three decades. At this pace, the total number of child brides is expected to double by 2050,” the report stated.

In Mauritania and Nigeria, more than half of adolescent girls aged 15 to 19, who are currently married, have husbands who are 10 or more years older than they are.

They are often married off to considerably older men. And sadly, more than 700 million women alive today were married before their 18th birthday.


Read more: http://metronaija.com/nigeria-will-highest-number-child-brides-2050-unicef/

Ango Abdullahi

Child marriage has adverse effects on the victims. Let me share a story I read online.

Alemtsahye Gebrekidan of Ethiopia can
remember the exact moment her childhood came to end. It was at the age of 10 when her mother interrupted her play to announce, “You’re going to marry.”
Two months later, she was married to a boy of 16. She gave birth to a son at the age of 13 and was widowed a year later.

To this day, she still feels angry with her parents for ruining her life by forcing her
to marry so young.
“My parents and his parents decided
[on the marriage],” she told the Daily Mail . “I didn’t choose.”
Before that traumatic event, she remembers life in Ethiopia’s northern Tigris province as being happy and healthy.
“I was in school, although I stopped the school when I was married. I do have happy memories of childhood – it was just eat and play.”

Childhood as she knew it came to an end the day she married her husband, a boy she met for the first time on her wedding day.
“I didn’t know him,” she said. “I was OK when I saw him – he was a child like me. He was upset as well, the same like me… he was 16 years old.”

Alemtsahye was lucky to have been given a husband near her own age because most child brides are forced to marry much older men. But she was still forced to leave home and school and begin to live as a traditional Ethiopian wife.

She was 13 when her son, Tefsalen, was born, and remembers the pregnancy and childbirth to have been particularly painful because of the
immaturity of her body.
“When I was pregnant, it was painful and I cried. And also when the baby was delivered it was so painful because I was a child,” she said.

Marrying at such an early age can be devastating for these children. Girls younger than 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20′s. This is why pregnancy remains the leading cause of death
worldwide for girls ages 15 to 19. Child brides also face a higher risk of contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases because they tend to marry older men who have had more intimate partners.

The north would have secede before then, not to worry UNICEF.

Cc Senator SANI YERIMA.

yep,that wud be in da republic that wudda chosen to adopt n keep da name 'nigeria',of cos arewa republic....