Rural Zimbabwean Families Face Drought, Fueling Child Marriages

Mutare, Zimbabwe — A towering billboard looms over a busy highway in Mutare, Zimbabwe’s eastern border city, its message stark and clear: “End Child Marriage: My Future, My Choice.”

A billboard in Mutare, Zimbabwe reads: “End Child Marriage: My Future, My Choice.”

This display is part of a years-long nationwide campaign by AHF Zimbabwe, a nonprofit organization working to end child marriage. Yet despite such efforts, the practice of child marriage has new cause for worry: the 2024 El Niño-induced drought, compounded by the knock-on effects of climate change, has ravaged Zimbabwe, leaving over 6 million people food insecure and the government scrambling to acquire up to $2 billion to feed its starving population. 

Many families — particularly in rural areas heavily dependent on agriculture and rain-fed crop farming — have resorted to marrying off their daughters to older men to secure money to make ends meet. This is despite various laws in Zimbabwe, including the country’s constitution, forbidding child marriages.

The issue reached a turning point in November 2024, when the Zimbabwe High Court struck down a restrictive law affecting abortion access. Previously, Zimbabwe maintained some of Africa’s strictest abortion laws, permitting the procedure only in cases of serious risk to the mother or child, or when pregnancy resulted from sexual assault. The court’s ruling now grants girls under 18 access to legal abortion, as well as married women who are victims of marital rape.

The ruling comes amid a troubling backdrop in Zimbabwe: since January 2024, the country has been in the throes of its largest El Niño-induced drought in over 40 years. Zimbabwe has joined Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, and Zambia in declaring the droughts a state of national disaster, with the crisis expected to deepen until the harvest season ends in April this year. 

“Many girls are abandoning school for voluntary or involuntary marriages,” said Weston Makoni, who chairs the Penhalonga Residents and Ratepayers Association. “In some cases, the parents are involved in negotiating the marriages, but they are doing these negotiations clandestinely. They know these marriages are illegal.”

According to Girls Not Brides, a global network of over 1,400 civil society organizations from over 100 countries committed to ending child marriage, daughters have been increasingly married off to reduce their perceived economic burden, or they are forced to drop out prematurely from school in order to work to support the family, traveling long distances to fetch drinking water.

Zimbabwe has one of the highest rates of child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa and has long been a practice until it was outlawed by various Acts of Parliament, including the country's 2013 constitution. A 2024 study by Women’s Refugee Commission researchers Katherine Gambir and Janna Metzler and independent research consultant Abel Blessing Matsika revealed that poverty and unmet basic needs, including household food insecurity, are among the key drivers of child marriage. Experts suggest that for the Zimbabwe High Court’s November 2024 ruling to benefit girls, it must work in concert with existing legislation.

“We need to enforce laws such as the Marriage Act, which sets the legal age of marriage at 18, and ensure harsher penalties for those facilitating child marriages. It is important to increase awareness in rural communities about the illegality of child marriages and the long-term harm it causes to girls,” Linda Tsungirirai Masarira, president of Labour Economists and Afrikan Democrats (LEAD), told More to Her Story.

Simultaneously, the Zimbabwean government should provide immediate support to vulnerable families in the form of food aid and drought-resilience programs in order to reduce the economic pressures leading families to resort to child marriages. Even then, in most cases the food assistance consists of wheat, rice and the staple maize but do not meet the hallmarks of a balanced diet.

“It is also imperative for the government to offer educational scholarships and free access to school supplies for girls at risk of dropping out of school,” said Masarira.

She says public awareness campaigns highlighting the importance of keeping girls in school and the detrimental effects of early marriage should be conducted in every village in rural areas, thereby working with traditional leaders, religious leaders, and community elders to address harmful cultural practices and promote gender equality. 

“[We need to] enforce existing laws against child marriage and close legal loopholes through institutional strengthening, and implement laws for free and compulsory education to keep girls in school,” Sipho Mpofu, a senior official at the Harare-based NGO Shamwari Yemwanasikana, told More to Her Story.

Mpofu also emphasized the need for economic support programs to ease financial burdens on families.

“Concerted efforts for raising awareness are needed from the government and the CSOs [civil society organizations] on climate smart livelihoods,  the  importance of delaying marriage and the benefits of education,” she said.