The ManicaPost
Tendai Gukutikwa
Post Reporter
A TOTAL of 153 school going children dropped out from school in Manicaland in 2022 as a result of child marriages and teenage pregnancies, the Provincial Education Director, Mr Edward Shumba has revealed.
Of these, 147 were girls, while only six were boys.
A total of 146 were doing their secondary education, while the rest were in primary school.
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr Shumba said there is a slight rise from 2021 statistics where 141 children dropped out of school because of the menace.
“While it seems as if we are fighting an already lost battle, we will not relent as our goal is to keep children in school and avoid the rising numbers of school dropouts,” he said.
Mr Shumba said more still needs to be done across the province, especially in Mutare and Mutasa districts as the 2022 cases were predominant in the two districts.
He said the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education will continue conducting community outreach awareness programmes, raising awareness against child marriages, and spreading the message on the importance of education.
Mr Shumba also said as the responsible authority, the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is providing access to education to every child and making sure that the children stay in school.
He, however, said this area is being affected by drop-out incidences among the girl child as a result of child marriages and teenage pregnancies.
“As a ministry, we are moving around the province, mostly in affected communities and raising awareness against this menace, but unfortunately it seems as if we are fighting a lost battle.
“However, that will not deter us. We will continue having our presence felt in the communities because we have to realise our vision of doing away with the plague. With an all stakeholders involvement approach, we will win,” he said.
According to the 2022 Population and Housing Census Preliminary Report on Fertility, 16.2 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 24 years were married before the legal age of 18 years, while one percent were married before the age of 15 years in Zimbabwe.
The report also shows that early pregnancies were more common in rural areas than in urban areas.
Presenting the findings when the report was released, Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) director-general, Mr Taguma Mahonde said child marriages are more common in rural areas than urban areas in the country.
“A total of 133 455 women aged 20-24 years, representing 16.2 percent of the total, were in union before attaining the age of 18 years,” he said.
“One percent of women aged 20-24 years were in union before the age of 15 years. The proportion was higher at 1.6 percent in rural areas as compared to 0.3 percent in urban areas.”
According to the Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey of 2016, 60 percent of Zimbabwean households are child-headed.
This constitutes an already vulnerable group as they lack education and financial independence.
According to Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Minister, Dr Stembiso Nyoni, the practise is common in rural areas, farming and mining communities where the educational, social and economic prospects for girls are usually very limited.
Speaking during an anti-child marriages campaign launch hosted by the Population Solutions for Health recently, Minister Nyoni said child marriages are detrimental to children and lead to problems which include denied access to their right to education, among the many detrimental effects they bring.
Minister Nyoni said to curb this plague, Government has set up the Zimbabwe National Action Plan and Communication Strategy on Ending Child Marriages, a strategic document that seeks to guide the country on the possible interventions on ending child marriages.
According to UNICEF, Zimbabwe is ranked number 41 globally on countries where children marry before turning 18 and is among the 20 countries with high prevalence rates of child marriages in Africa.
Statistics according to the multi-indicator cluster survey of 2019 also indicate that 34 percent of girls in Zimbabwe marry before they reach the age of 18 and seven percent of these girls are married before they turn 15.
“These high figures are not just numbers, but they signify the proportion of the future generation whose life has been shattered as a result of child marriages. Their right to education is denied because they have to end up heading families,” said Minister Nyoni.
