Emir sends warning to NGO tackling under-15 marriage in the north

Forty-one percent of girls in the northwest still marry below the age of 15 years. And there might little the government or NGO can do about it.

It’s a fight between culture and civilisation

You can’t fight that easily in the north, Emir of Daura Kabir Usman seems to warn the NGO in his remark..

Save the Children International, an NGO, said this in its latest report titled “Reaching and Empowering Adolescents in Health (REACH)”.

The work was carried out in Gombe, Kastina and Zamfara states.

According to Save the Children, in 2018 adolescent girls who were married before the age of 15 years were 54 percent. That has been reduced to 41 percent now.

The Programme Director for REACH, Rahinatu Hussaini who disclosed this at the close-out of the project yesterday in Abuja.

She also maintained that although the figure of teenage childbearing in the northwest and the north-east has dropped, it is still an issue that needs to be addressed.

Teenage pregnancy in the northwest dropped from 36 percent in 2013 to 28 percent in 2018 while that of the north-east dropped from 32 to 24 percent within the same period.

Hussaini said there are still a lot of issues around adolescent sexual reproductive health in the region.