KAMPALA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As coordinator of a shelter for pregnant teenagers in central Uganda, Ritah Ssetumba has seen thousands of young girls struggling to cope with having a child but even she was shocked when an 11-year-old girl arrived pregnant and married.
The girl, identified as Aidah, was referred to the Wamukisa Youth Centre by a village hospital in Buikwe District, 60 km (37 miles) from the capital Kampala, where she gave birth to a boy with her 16-year-old husband by her side. Aidah is one of about 300,000 girls each year to get pregnant in Uganda which has one of the world’s highest rates of pre-teen and teenage pregnancies as the east African nation struggles to enforce laws to clamp down on child marriages.
One in every four girls aged between 15 and 19 fall pregnant, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, and nearly half of girls are married before 18. “Aidah was the youngest pregnant child we have ever got in almost a decade of our operations,” Ssetumba told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview at their premises in Kampala. “But what shocked us even more was that the girl had been married off by her mother a year earlier and she also considered herself married.” According to Ssetumba the mother agreed to let the then 10-year-old Aidah marry the 16-year-old to settle a debt with his family. Aware of the dangers of child marriage, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, working with U.S. non-government organisation Vital Voices Global Partnership, is trying to raise awareness among girls about the dangers of early marriage and teenage pregnancy through theatrical drama and plays in schools.
