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Zimbabwe should step up its efforts to support the girl child’s progress and protect them from all forms of abuse

Yesterday Zimbabwe joined the rest of the world in commemorating the United Nations International Day of the Girl Child.This year’s theme “Girls Progress: A Global Data Movement” resonates well with objectives for individual nations that have been working in their respective corners in collecting and analysing girl focused and sex aggregated data.

Member nations intend to use the data to assess progress made in making a difference in the life of the girl child, look at the challenges being faced and proffer quantifiable solutions.Even statistics pointing to how many girls the globe has, become important at this stage.

According to Zimstats (2012) there are more than 1,5 million girls in Zimbabwe today, that translates into a powerful constituency for transforming the country and take it to the next level.

The girls who are in various stages of growth are brimming with ingenuity, creativity and confidence. But their potential and dreams may come to naught if a myriad of challenges standing in their way are not addressed.

Early child marriages, sexual abuse, gender based violence and patriarchal attitudes that regard boys as superior than girls threaten to destroy their dreams and throw them in an abyss of poverty if no immediate solutions are found to address these challenges.

Child marriages alone, stand in the way of the girls’ progress and the statistics are frightening. Thirty percent of girls in Zimbabwe are married off, resulting in the majority of them dropping out of school.

Once they are out of school, a majority of the girls get entangled in a vicious cycle of poverty, reducing their opportunities of having a good life in the future.

Apart from the social stigma they are likely to face, they end up in violent marriages because of the power dynamics within those relationships.They also experience birth complications and the practice has been deemed to cause high mortality rates.Thus the cycle of violence and poverty that begins in girlhood, carries over into womanhood and across generations until the woman dies.

Suffice to say, the sad narrative on child marriages will only change if local leadership makes serious commitments to align laws and police their implementation.After all, the ground work has since been set after the Constitutional Court this year outlawed child marriages by ruling that no child in Zimbabwe should marry before attaining 18 years.

In a landmark ruling that was meant to change the legal landscape of Zimbabwe and offer relief to the girl child, Deputy Chief Justice Luke Malaba ruled that the supreme law of the country sets 18 years as the age of majority, hence no child should marry before that age.

But, that will only happen once community leaders mandated to safeguard the welfare of these girls walk the talk instead of abusing the flock they are herding as is the case at the moment.A Parliamentary committee recently revealed that some Government officials including Members of Parliament are sexual predators targeting minors, but continue to walk scot free.

The revelations contained in a report compiled by the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development following public hearings with various stakeholders on the prevalence of child marriages in Mashonaland Central Province, noted that early child marriages were rife with some Government officials being fingered.

Faced with such a sad state of affairs, all relevant stakeholders should empower the girl child and raise the awareness on their rights, advocate for the adoption and implementation of laws and policies that prohibit and prevent child marriages.

Communities should also play their part by bringing perpetrators, especially greedy parents and relatives to book.As celebrations on the International Day of the Girl Child take centre stage across the globe, Zimbabwe should step up its efforts to support the girl child’s progress and protect them from all forms of abuse.

Let girls be girls!