WUNRN
TANZANIA - GOVERNMENT HOPES NEW
TANZANIA CONSTITUTION BANS CHILD MARRIAGE
A Muslim girl
attends a Koranic school in the
DAR ES SALAAM,
The marriage Act of 1971 allows girls as young
as 14-years-old to marry with parental consent. On average, two out of five
girls are married off before their 18th birthday, putting
Mathias Chikawe, the Constitutional and Legal
Affairs Minister said the government has been trying to change the laws that
allow child marriages by raising the marriage age to 18 but that society has
not been cooperative.
Chikawe, who took part in high-level panel
discussions to end child marriage, organised to mark the International Day of
the Girl Child, said the government had conducted a survey with the intent to
change both the marriage law and the capital punishment law.
“But to our surprise, different communities wanted
both laws to remain as they are. In fact, some communities even queried why the
age of consent for girls to marry should be 18,” he told the Daily News.
Chikawe said that the government has presented
its views to the Constitutional Review Commission on the need for a new law
that will allow girls only 18-years-old and older to get married.
"I remain hopeful that the government will
finally enact the right laws in this case, through the envisaged new
constitution," he told the Daily News.
Women’s rights groups said there is a
strong correlation between child marriage, school dropout rates, early
pregnancy and HIV/AIDS and it is estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of
World Bank data shows that 22.8 percent of girls
aged 15 to 19 in Tanzania had children or were pregnant in 2010, while the
adolescent fertility rate (the number of births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19) was
129, giving Tanzania the highest adolescent fertility rate in the world - a
situation blamed to a large extent on early marriage and a high school dropout
rate, the Daily
News reported in April.