CLAIM: One in three girls in Zimbabwe gets married before the age of 18, while 5% of girls are married off before the age of 15.
SOURCE: Newsday
VERDICT: Inaccurate
In an article dated 24 December, 2022, ‘Feature: Child rights get more focus in bid to fight early marriages’, the daily newspaper NewsDay made a claim that “one in three girls in Zimbabwe gets married before the age of 18, while 5% of girls are married off before the age of 15”.
The claim was based on statistics used by the United Nations Children’s Fund in March 2022.
The claim has been rated inaccurate instead of false because at the time the claim was made by UNICEF, it was accurate but was no longer so at the time the newspaper used the statistic in December.
Understanding Child Marriage
Child marriage is defined by UNICEF any formal marriage or informal union between a child under the age of 18 and an adult or another child. The prevalence rate is calculated by the number of women between the ages of 20 and 24 who had been married by the age of 18.
Child rights organisations argue that at its core, child marriage — where one or both parties are children under 18 — violates child protection and human rights; compromises a child’s development and severely limits their opportunities in life.
Zimbabwe has committed to eliminate child, early and forced marriage by 2030 in line with target 5.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals. During its Voluntary National Review at the 2017 High Level Political Forum, the government reaffirmed commitment to this target.
Child marriage is more common in rural areas of Zimbabwe.
Data from the 2014 MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey) indicated that 40% of women aged 20-24 living in rural areas were married or in a union before the age of 18, compared to 19% in urban areas. The national prevalence rate was 32.8 for women between the ages of 20 and 49.
There was an increase of these figures in the MICS of 2019, with 43.7% of rural girls and 21.3% in urban areas, married before the age of 18. This gave a national prevalence rate of 33.7% or one in three girls.
According to UNICEF, by 2019, Zimbabwe ranked among the 20 African nations in which child marriages were most prevalent.
Is more recent data available?
In 2022, ZimStat carried out a national census. Child marriage prevalence rate was one of the issues covered in the exercise and the results were presented as part of the 2022 Population and Housing Census Preliminary Results on Fertility.
The data collected indicates that there has been a marked decrease in the number of women between the ages of 20-24 who were married before the age of 18 from 33.7% – one in three girls – recorded in 2019 to 16.2% – one in six girls.
The proportion was 22.7% in rural areas and 7.2% in urban areas.
Mashonaland Central had the highest proportion of 28.8% of women who got married before age of 18.
Mash West: 22.8% Manicaland: 21.4% Harare: 7.7% Bulawayo: 2.6%
A national level, 1.0% of the women aged 20–24 years, got married before attaining age 15. The proportion was higher at 1.6% in rural areas compared to urban areas at 0.3%.
What could have led to the decrease?
2015 marked a big legal advancement for child brides in Zimbabwe with the Mudzuru case (Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe, 2015). Two women, former child brides, asked the Court to interpret and apply constitutional provisions on the law on child marriage to address the practice . In this landmark case, the Court ruled that Section 78(1), which states that every person who has attained the age of 18 has the right to found a family, read together with s 81 of the Constitution, which accords special protection to children, defined as all boys and girls under the age of 18, sets the legal age to marry at 18 years old. It further declared that any law, custom, and practice, which authorises child marriage was unconstitutional.
Prior to this, Zimbabwean law was scattered and contradicting. Section 70(4) of the Criminal Law Act initially provided that the age limit for sexual intercourse was 16. Worse off, the Customary Marriage Act did not provide any minimum age for marriage. However, these gaps were filled by the Marriage Bill which was signed into law in 2022, setting at 18 the minimum age to marry, in line with Section 78 of the Constitution.
According to UNICEF, the prevalence rate has decreased globally over the past decade – from one in four girls married a decade ago to approximately one in five today.
However, one of the impacts of COVID-19 was expected to be an increase – again – in the number of child marriages, though yet to be measured.
Conclusion
The claim by the NewsDay that one in three girls in Zimbabwe gets married before the age of 18, while 5% of girls are married off before the age of 15, has been rated inaccurate. The newspaper, while correctly stating that the figures it was using were from UNICEF in March 2022, fails to follow to the primary source of the data. The statistic was based on the 2019 MICS. However, more recent data from the 2022 census shows that one in six girls gets married before the age of 18, while 1% of girls are married off before the age of 15.
