Today's news reported that a 16 year old girl has won the right to be placed on the airport watch list to stop her parents taking her to Lebanon for an arranged marriage. It is estimated that more than 25,000 girls under the age of 18 are married every day. At this rate, 100 million more girls – around 10 million each year – will become child brides across the next decade. Child marriage is outlawed in many countries and international agreements forbid the practice. However, this tradition still spans continents, language, religion and caste. Girls face huge risks when they marry young. If a girl marries before she is 18, she will face a much higher risk of death and injury because of early sexual activity and childbearing. If she is under 15, she is five times more likely to die during childbirth than a woman in her 20s (and if she is between ages 15-19, she is twice as likely to die). Documentary photographer Stephanie Sinclair has documented the phenomenon of child marriage in India, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ethiopia in Too Young to Wed: The Secret World of Child Brides. This month a new global effort to end child marriage was announced at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting, turning the international spotlight on a harmful traditional practice that affects the lives of 10 million girls in dozens of countries around the world every year. As CGI members, The Elders, the Ford Foundation, the Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation committed to:
- Building Girls Not Brides into a fully-fledged partnership organisation, with at least 150 members running programmes in at least 20 countries by December 2012.
- Raising US$3 million to ensure the functioning of the partnership, the creation of a secretariat, and to seed activities to end child marriage in priority countries.
- Establishing a network of donors to support programmes to end child marriage worldwide.