As monsoon rains were about to break over Pakistan, 14-year-old Shamila and her 13-year-old sister Amina were married off in exchange for money, a decision their parents made to help the family survive the threat of floods.
“I was happy to hear I was getting married... I thought my life would become easier,” Shamila said after her wedding to a man twice her age in hope of a more prosperous life. “But I have nothing more, and with the rain, I fear I will have even less, if that is possible.”
Pakistan’s high rate of marriages for underage girls had been inching lower in the past few years, but after unprecedented floods in 2022, rights workers say that such weddings are on the rise due to climate-driven economic insecurity.
Photo: AFP
The summer monsoon between July and September is vital for the livelihoods of millions of farmers and food security, but scientists say climate change is making them heavier and longer, raising the risk of landslides, floods and long-term crop damage.
Many villages in the agricultural belt of Sindh Province have not recovered from the 2022 floods, which plunged one-third of the country underwater, displaced millions and ruined harvests.
“This has led to a new trend of ‘monsoon brides,’” said Mashooque Birhmani, the founder of the non-governmental organization Sujag Sansar, which works with religious academics to combat child marriage.
Photo: AFP
“Families will find any means of survival. The first and most obvious way is to give their daughters away in marriage in exchange for money,” Birhmani said.
Since the 2022 floods, child marriage has spiked in villages in Dadu District, one of the worst-hit areas that for months resembled a lake, he said.
In Khan Mohammad Mallah village, where Shamila and Amina were married in a joint ceremony in June, 45 underage girls have become wives since the last monsoon.
Fifteen of them were married in May and June.
“Before the 2022 rains, there was no such need to get girls married so young in our area,” village elder Mai Hajani, 65, said. “They would work on the land, make rope for wooden beds, the men would be busy with fishing and agriculture. There was always work to be done.”
Parents said that they hurried the marriage of their daughters to save them from poverty, usually in exchange for money.
Shamila’s mother-in-law, Bibi Sachal, said they gave 200,000 rupees (US$720.86) to the young bride’s parents — a major sum in a region where most families survive on about US$1 a day.
Najma Ali was initially swept up in the excitement of becoming a wife when she married at 14 in 2022 and began living with her in-laws, as is tradition in Pakistan.
“My husband gave my parents 250,000 rupees for our wedding, but it was on loan [from a third party] that he has no way of paying back now,” she said.
“I thought I would get lipstick, makeup, clothes and crockery,” she said, cradling her six-month-old baby. “Now I am back home with a husband and a baby because we have nothing to eat.”
Their village, which lies on the banks of a canal in the Main Nara Valley, is barren and there are no fish left in the polluted water. Its stench overwhelms the area.
“We had lush rice fields where girls used to work,” said Hakim Zaadi, 58, the village matron and Najma’s mother.
“They would grow many vegetables, which are all dead now because the water in the ground is poisonous. This has happened especially after 2022,” she added. “The girls were not a burden on us before then. At the age girls used to get married, they now have five children, and they come back to live with their parents because their husbands are jobless.”
Child marriages are common in parts of Pakistan, which has the sixth-highest number of girls married before the age of 18 in the world, government data published in December last year showed.
The legal age for marriage varies from 16 to 18 in different regions, but the law is rarely enforced.
The UN Children’s Fund has reported “significant strides” in reducing child marriage, but evidence shows that extreme weather events put girls at risk.
“We would expect to see an 18 percent increase in the prevalence of child marriage, equivalent to erasing five years of progress,” it said in a report after the 2022 floods.
Dildar Ali Sheikh, 31, had planned to marry off his eldest daughter Mehtab while living in an aid camp after being displaced by the floods.
“When I was there, I thought to myself: ‘We should get our daughter married so at least she can eat and have basic facilities,’” the daily wage laborer said.
Mehtab was 10 years old at the time.
“The night I decided to get her married, I couldn’t sleep,” said her mother, Sumbal Ali Sheikh, who was 18 when she married.
An intervention from Sujag Sansar led to the wedding being postponed, and Mehtab was enrolled in a sewing workshop, allowing her to earn a small income while continuing her education.
However, when the monsoon rains fall, she is overcome by dread that her promised wedding would also arrive.
“I have told my father I want to study,” she said. “I see married girls around me who have very challenging lives and I don’t want this for myself.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) last week recorded an increase in the number of shareholders to the highest in almost eight months, despite its share price falling 3.38 percent from the previous week, Taiwan Stock Exchange data released on Saturday showed. As of Friday, TSMC had 1.88 million shareholders, the most since the week of April 25 and an increase of 31,870 from the previous week, the data showed. The number of shareholders jumped despite a drop of NT$50 (US$1.59), or 3.38 percent, in TSMC’s share price from a week earlier to NT$1,430, as investors took profits from their earlier gains
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned. Completed early this year and undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, according to two people with knowledge of the project. EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold
TAIWAN VALUE CHAIN: Foxtron is to fully own Luxgen following the transaction and it plans to launch a new electric model, the Foxtron Bria, in Taiwan next year Yulon Motor Co (裕隆汽車) yesterday said that its board of directors approved the disposal of its electric vehicle (EV) unit, Luxgen Motor Co (納智捷汽車), to Foxtron Vehicle Technologies Co (鴻華先進) for NT$787.6 million (US$24.98 million). Foxtron, a half-half joint venture between Yulon affiliate Hua-Chuang Automobile Information Technical Center Co (華創車電) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), expects to wrap up the deal in the first quarter of next year. Foxtron would fully own Luxgen following the transaction, including five car distributing companies, outlets and all employees. The deal is subject to the approval of the Fair Trade Commission, Foxtron said. “Foxtron will be
INFLATION CONSIDERATION: The BOJ governor said that it would ‘keep making appropriate decisions’ and would adjust depending on the economy and prices The Bank of Japan (BOJ) yesterday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years and said more increases are in the pipeline if conditions allow, in a sign of growing conviction that it can attain the stable inflation target it has pursued for more than a decade. Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda’s policy board increased the rate by 0.2 percentage points to 0.75 percent, in a unanimous decision, the bank said in a statement. The central bank cited the rising likelihood of its economic outlook being realized. The rate change was expected by all 50 economists surveyed by Bloomberg. The
RSS