Northern Ethiopia’s Amhara region has a landscape of red soil, small farms, and rolling green hills. Amhara’s 19 million people are poor and rely almost entirely on agriculture. The region is served by few roads, children rarely get more than a few years of education, and they often walk many miles to school.

It also has one of the highest rates of child marriage on earth. Eighty percent of girls in Amhara are married by the time they are eighteen; half by the age of fifteen. This harmful traditional practice affects an estimated 10 million girls around the world every year1—that’s more than twenty-five thousand girls every day.

In Amhara, we met many young women in their late teens and early twenties, some of whom had married as young as eight or ten and had their first children at thirteen or fourteen. Archbishop Tutu admitted frankly that he found the experience “devastating.” In one tiny village, sitting in the shade of tall trees, these women and girls explained that, for them, marriage was not a day of happiness. It was the day they stopped going to school, began living with a man they had never met, and started having sex, whether they wanted to or not. Child marriage is deeply embedded in the social customs of Amhara, as it is in many countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and some communities in Europe and the Americas. For thousands of years, families have married girls young. There are many reasons for this: to protect her and the family’s honor, as sex before marriage is seen as shameful; to reduce the economic burden on the family; or to gain a bride price. In close, traditional communities, social pressure to marry is considerable, and a girl not married by eighteen often risks being viewed with suspicion—along with her entire family.

While we acknowledge the value of tradition in all our lives, we believe that child marriage is a harmful traditional practice—it is a violation of human rights and a major hindrance to development.

A Violation of Human Rights and a Hindrance to Development

Child marriage, whether an official marriage under the law or a customary union, is without doubt a fundamental violation of human rights.