RAPTI SONARI, Nepal – Sapana dreamed of becoming a government official. Every night, in her hut along a rugged dirt road, the 17-year-old lit a single solar-powered lamp hanging from the ceiling and banged on books, drawing a very different future from her mother’s.
But as the coronavirus spread across Nepal, closing schools, Sapana lost focus. Trapped in her village with little to do, she befriended an unemployed worker.
They fell in love. Soon they were married. Now, Sapana has given up on her professional dreams, with no plans to return to school.
“Things could have been different if I hadn’t interrupted my studies,” said Sapana recently, while breastfeeding her 2-month-old son on the floor of his simple home. Your family name has been withheld to protect your privacy.
What happened to Sapana in a small town in Nepal is happening to girls across the developing world. Child marriage is increasing at alarming levels in many places, the United Nations says, and the coronavirus pandemic is reversing years of progress made with difficulty in keeping girls in school.
In a report released on Monday, the United Nations Children’s Fund predicted that an additional 10 million girls in this decade will be at risk of child marriage, defined as a union before the age of 18. Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, said that “Covid -19 has made an already difficult situation for millions of girls even worse. “
“Covid-19 definitely took us back,” said Nankali Maksud, a senior UNICEF advisor.
In some cases, girls are forced by their parents or other authority figures to marry older men. But child advocates are also concerned about young women who, because of the impact of the pandemic, are dropping out of school and see early marriage as their only option, abandoning ambitions for a better education and life.
Many child marriages are never registered. UNICEF estimates that 650 million girls and women alive today were married in childhood. Child advocates say they are seeing an increase in places where this has been a problem for a long time, such as India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia and Malawi, where teenage pregnancies in some areas have tripled.
In Nepal, where the legal age for marriage is 20 years old, the situation seems especially serious. Country-specific and interconnected problems now make it difficult for many young women to avoid early marriage.
One of the poorest nations in Asia, Nepal depends on remittances and tourism. The pandemic devastated both. Usually, at this time of year, foreign tourists go to the mountains to start expensive hikes in the Annapurna Mountain Range and climb the slopes of Mount Everest. This year, the money that flows from them to so many layers of Nepal’s economy is almost gone.
Millions of Nepalese workers work abroad, often as cooks, janitors, maids, guards and babysitters in India or the Middle East. In 2019, Nepal earned $ 8.25 billion from remittances abroad. But, with most world economies suffering, this flow of remittances has also slowed. Legions of young Nepalese, many of whom are single, have recently returned home.
Many others lost their jobs in Nepal’s cities. A large number of young people now roam around their mountain villages, bored and penniless. That was how Sapana met her husband, Hardas.
Hardas, who said he was about 20 years old, worked as an itinerant bricklayer, often in cities like Kathmandu and Nepalgunj. But after being fired in April, at the start of the pandemic, he returned to his homeland, Rapti Sonari, a small town with about 10,000 inhabitants, 300 miles west of Kathmandu.
The houses are spread out in a maze of dirt roads under the hills. Most are made of mud and stone. Sapana’s father, Ram Dayal, bought an automotive rickshaw shortly before the blockade. Now he has monthly payments of 30,000 rupees, about $ 250, and almost no customers.
Mr. Dayal was not happy that his daughter was getting married so young, but he admitted that her departure helped to ease his financial burden. He has five other mouths to feed.
“She would have a better life if she finished 10th grade,” said Dayal.
Ghumni, his wife and mother from Sapana, agreed. She was also a child bride and ended up with four children and no education.
Activists fighting child marriage say they are working in the most difficult conditions they have ever faced, even as the problem worsens. Nepal imposed severe restrictions on the movement of vehicles. When infections increased, activists were confined indoors like everyone else. Several said the number of child marriages in their areas doubled or almost doubled during the pandemic.
“We are back to square one,” said Hira Khatri, an anti-child marriage activist in the district that includes Rapti Sonari.
Two years ago, Khatri said, she intervened and prevented seven child marriages in her village. This did not make it popular. Many families in Nepal are eager to marry their daughters. Some residents threatened to kill her, Khatri said, and threw used condoms outside her home to humiliate her.
The police did not help much. Village-based policemen have been much more focused on enforcing quarantine rules and keeping an eye out for virus cases. Some policemen expressed reluctance to get involved.
“These are serious criminal charges,” said Om Bahadur Rana, a police officer in Nepalgunj. “If we open a case because of a child marriage, it could hurt the chance of young people getting a public job.”
Across central Nepal, many families shared stories of how their daughters disappeared in premature marriages.
Mayawati, 17, who also lives in Rapti Sonari, dreamed of studying agriculture. But her family’s struggles during the pandemic made her feel guilty about being a burden on her parents. She dropped out of school and married a man who worked as a handyman. His dreams also disappeared silently.
“We have no money,” said Mayawati, whose surname was also withheld. “How should I continue my studies?”
Mayawati said that most of her friends who were married during the blockade are now pregnant.
Some people in Nepal have strong opinions about what they see as the benefits of child marriage. Several elders in the Madhesi community, based in the southern plains near the border with India, said they had falsified their daughters’ birth certificates to avoid problems.
“Marrying young daughters made me happier. It’s our practice, ”said Mina Kondu, who said she recently tampered with her 16-year-old daughter’s birth certificate, making her appear to be 19, who was still under the legal age, but close enough, the family believed.
“The police cannot stop us,” she said.
Kondu, who lives in a village about a three-hour drive from Sapana, said that if families did not arrange for their daughters to marry young, the daughters would do it anyway, without permission, and would dishonor the family.
Sapana’s family accepted their recent marriage. Within a few months, Sapana stopped studying for school and took care of her baby and her new husband.
She collects grass to feed the family’s four buffalo.
She washes clothes.
She cooks rice and flat bread.
“I was unable to finish my studies, it is true,” she said. “My son is going to do this.”
And then she added, after a moment, “I hope he gets married when he’s fully grown.”
Bhadra Sharma reported from Rapti Sonari, Nepal, and Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi.