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India, Four Other Countries Account For Half Of World's Child Marriages: UNICEF Report
Writer: Palak Agrawal
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Others/World, 12 March 2021 8:38 AM GMT
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The report titled 'COVID-19: A threat to progress against child marriage' pointed out that one crore additional child marriages may occur before the end of the decade.
About 650 million girls and women alive today globally were married during their childhood, and about half of them are in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India and Nigeria, according to a recently released United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) report.
The UNICEF analysis highlights the prevalence of child marriage and the impact of the pandemic on this social practice. Titled 'COVID-19: A threat to progress against child marriage', the study said one crore additional child marriages might occur before the end of the decade.
It stated that as many as 10 crore girls were at risk of child marriage in the next 10 years, even before the novel coronavirus outbreak. The high number comes despite significant reductions in child marriage across several countries in the recent past.
"In the last 10 years, the proportion of young women globally who were married as children had decreased by 15 per cent, from nearly 1 in 4 to 1 in 5, the equivalent of some 25 million marriages averted, again that is now under threat," the report said.
Hasseniya was a child when she was married in Mauritania. By 16, she'd had her first child.
Countries Under The Radar
The United Nations agency stated that levels of child marriage were highest in sub-Saharan Africa, where 35 per cent of young women were married before the age of 18, followed by South Asia, where nearly 30 per cent of women were married before they turned 18.
About 24 per cent of such instances were recorded in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the report, the Middle East and North Africa had 17 per cent of child marriages, whereas Eastern Europe and Central Asia had about 12 per cent of child marriages.
According to UNICEF estimates, each year, at least 1.5 million girls under the age of 18 get married in India. The numbers make the country home to the largest number of child brides in the world — accounting for a third of the global total. Nearly 16 per cent of adolescent girls aged 15-19 are currently married.
Stating that although the prevalence of girls getting married before age 18 in India has declined from 47 per cent to 27 per cent between 2005-2006 and 2015-2016, it still stood high from a global perspective.
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