Africa

At the radio station in Selibabi, Mauritania. Credit: World Bank/Vincent Tremeau

By External Source
SELIBABI, Mauritania, Jan 2 2020 (IPS)

“I refused to marry off my daughter for a simple, good reason: I want my daughter to be empowered,” said Lemeima mint El Hadrami, 49. “I don’t want her to go through the same difficulties I did when I was young.” El Hadrami was married when she was only 13.

As is often the case for child brides, she became pregnant in adolescence and was forced to drop out of school. She had two daughters, both following difficult pregnancies. Then her husband left them.

“Back then, people didn’t know that child marriage was harmful to a girl’s health. It was a common practice for us,” she recalled. El Hadrami is from Selibabi in southeastern Mauritania, a country where 37 per cent of girls are married off by age 18.

Ending child marriage in Mauritania and other countries in the Sahel, where the median age women and girls marry is 16.6, calls for a change in society’s unwritten rules governing the practice. This means getting buy-in from religious and community leaders on a whole host of related issues, including gender discrimination and ending gender-based violence.

The UN Population(fund (UNFPA) is working with partners to help raise awareness of the cascading harms caused by child marriage – from school discontinuation to higher maternal health risks and poorer long-term outcomes for girls and their families.

“An immature girl cannot bear a child because she herself is still a child whose body is not ready to carry a baby,” said Telmidy, the imam of the Kuba Mosque in Selibabi, stressing that many adolescent girls in his communities have died for that reason alone.

El Hadrami (centre) with her daughters and sister. Credit: World Bank/Vincent Tremeau

Telmidy is one of 200 religious and community leaders mobilized across Mauritania by the Sahel Women’s Empowerment and Demographic Dividend (SWEDD) project, a collaboration between UNFPA and others, to show that child marriage is in fact haram, or forbidden by Islam.

“Early marriage is a complex issue and we have addressed it in a manner that respects Islam,” he said. “Islam protects the dignity of men and women.”

Telmidy and his fellow imams want to be agents of change. “We discuss and share our knowledge of Islam and our experience by going door to door or during Friday prayers and people are starting to understand and respond.”

The SWEDD project is financed by the World Bank and implemented by the governments of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, with technical support from UNFPA.

In addition to working with religious leaders, the project shares messages on girls’ empowerment through a popular radio programme.

“I was really moved by the messages on the radio,” El Hadrami said. “I do not want my daughter to experience the same difficulties that I did. I would like her to go as far as possible in her studies, to have a good job – a job that will allow her to enjoy a decent standard of living. She could become a minister, a doctor or a midwife.”

The radio messages work in concert with the faith-based outreach efforts.

Imam Telmidy raises awareness about the dangers of child marriage to women. Credit: World Bank/Vincent Tremeau

“The recommendations and guidelines broadcast on the radio are very important, especially because they are supported by religious beliefs,” said Telmidy. “People must listen to the radio to be informed.”

The imams have reached around 370,000 people in rural Mauritania with training sessions on the dangers of child marriage. UNFPA is also helping the national network of Islamic scholars to learn about sexual and reproductive health issues, including not only related child marriage concerns, but also the benefits of birth spacing, and the importance of ending gender-based violence and female genital mutilation.

“Islam is a religion that honours human beings. Any action that harms an individual’s physical or mental health is therefore forbidden,” said Hademine Saleck Ely, an imam from the Central Mosque of Nouakchott. “But some people are wedded to traditional practices and do not understand the danger of these customs.”

Telmidy pointed out that acquiring knowledge is compulsory for all Muslims: “The Qur’an shows that a father has a responsibility to educate his daughters and protect them, and that he must delay their marriage until they turn 18… He must also allow them to earn a living, that is their right.”

“We must assume our responsibilities and fulfill our mission to share our knowledge with the community,” he added.

A version of this story was first published at www.worldbank.org.

The post In Mauritania, Imams take to Radio Waves to say Child Marriage is Against Islam appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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By Siddharth Chatterjee
NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 31 2019 (IPS)

Happy New Year, Kenya. 2020 marks a decade of action towards the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Peace and development are inextricably linked, with each making the achievement of the other far more likely. This puts the conflict-prevention and development work of the UN at the heart of the agenda in East Africa, but in a multi-agency and programme environment, making meaningful progress is challenging.

Aware of this, the UN began a process of structural reforms led by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres who made reforms of the United Nations, a priority at the very beginning of his term in January 2017. The aim being to deliver better results through cooperation, collaboration and integration. 2019 was the year that the impact of these reforms became real and nowhere more than in the peace, conflict-prevention and development pillars of the UN’s work.

At the country level, that shift towards a nimble, 21st century UN challenges deeply entrenched practices and operations. In a country team with over 23 individual agencies, funds and programmes, the reform process can be complicated, even messy.

To the credit of the Kenya country team, we overcame the challenges of ceding long-held agency interests for the collective good and achieved some ground-breaking milestones in our partnership with governments, civic organizations and the private sector.

The most outstanding was our venturing out to confront challenges that transcend borders. East Africa faces major threats to peace and development across multiple fronts, and respective UN country teams have, in a remarkable show of teamwork, sought to harmonize their responses to these threats. Internecine border conflicts and the effects of climate change together make a formidable challenge that brought together UN teams from Kenya and Uganda, in a pact that seeks to bring sustainable development to the Karamoja triangle.

This pact follows from another successful regional collaboration project on the Kenya-Ethiopia border where communities accustomed to recurrent hostilities are now reaching out to each other to find solutions to common socio-economic challenges.

We believe that our regional surge towards prevention, peacemaking and diplomacy will have a particular impact on the youth, who suffer an enduring sense of being neglected and ignored. This narrative is a breeding ground for extremism and radicalization, so addressing such concerns was a key point of deliberation during last July’s African Regional High-Level Conference on Counter-Terrorism and the Prevention of Violent Extremism in Nairobi.

The same regional approach was behind the initiative by Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia to sign the Declaration and Action Plan to End Cross-border FGM in April 2019. This was the first time multiple countries had come together to tackle this pernicious cross-border crime.

But there remain many in the region still left behind by development, and we continue to stand up for them through our UN Development Assistance Framework 2018-2022. The framework’s gender equality and rights focus is unmistakable, because in too many communities, the simple fact of being born female shatters one’s chances of living in full human dignity.

Our focus on giving a leg-up to those left farthest behind has attracted a positive response from our partners in national and county governments. By staying in lockstep with national priorities on issues such as health, agriculture and housing, the common thread of messages from our partners is that we are staying effective and responsive to the ambitions of Kenyans.

As 2020 beckons, the decade of action starts and it has to be a sprint to deliver on the SDGs, the UN team in Kenya is rolling up its sleeves with greater urgency, ambition and innovation. We will enhance regional cooperation and private-public partnerships as we work with the Government towards lifting millions of the citizens of this region out of poverty and upholding their human rights.

We are re-imagining ways of delivering development in ways such as the co-creation of an SDG innovation lab between the Government of Kenya, the Centre for Effective Global Action at the University of California in Berkeley, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the UN. The SDG Lab will kick off with support for the delivery of Kenya’s Big Four agenda by harnessing, big data, technology and innovation to achieve scale and impact.

As a UN country team, we got off the blocks in 2019 in pursuit of UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed’s challenge to “flip the orthodoxy” for the repositioning of the UN. We have dared to go beyond the typical and will do whatever it takes to respond effectively to the challenges faced by Kenya’s people, now and in the future.

Siddharth Chatterjee is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Kenya.

The post 2020 Is the Decade of Action & It Has to Be a Sprint appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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