This terms seminar series at the Institute addresses adolescence. ‘Navigating life in sub-Saharan Africa – adolescent socio-ecologies’ focusing on the environments in which female adolescents negotiate their lives in sub-Saharan Africa and how this influences their decision-making. Presentations will consider a range of frames including resilience, intergenerational relationships, violence, education and the media.
The intergenerational component is especially relevant, with a cycle of transmission of poverty from mother to child. Poor parents have poor children, and those children are more likely to grow up as poor adults because of the structural, social and health limitations faced as children. Of particular concern is the impact on young girls and how this is transmitted across the life course. Poverty leads to lack of schooling and early marriage, high fertility and reduced well-being. Of particular concern is the situation of adolescent girls and in particular those age 10-14 in the transition from child to adolescent.
As Barbara Mensch pointed out nearly two decades ago,
“During adolescence, the world expands for boys and contracts for girls. Boys enjoy new privileges reserved for men; girls endure new restrictions reserved for women. Boys gain autonomy, mobility, opportunity, and power (including power over girls’ sexual and reproductive lives); girls are systematically deprived of these assets”. (Mensch, Bruce & Greene, 1998).
Government concern around adolescents has tended to focus on public health issues such unsafe sex facilitating the transmission of HIV/AIDS and STDs or early pregnancy with its associated high risks of maternal and infant mortality yet adolescent girls face a particular set of problems.
“their risk of exploitative living arrangements; confinement to domestic roles and responsibilities; restricted mobility; inadequate and occasionally threatening school experience; unacknowledged work needs and compromising work situations; pressure to marry and begin childbearing early; and limited control over, and knowledge about, their reproductive health and fertility, even (perhaps especially) in the case of married girls” (Harper, Alder & Pereznieto, 2012)
Many teenage girls are already wives and mothers, and need particular support to function in these roles as well at such young ages. Globally over 100 million girls aged between 10 and 19 have married over the past decade, making them vulnerable to the risk of young child birth Indeed the WHO estimates that up around 70,000 young girls die from the complications of pregnancy and childbirth every year. Girls who give birth aged under 20 have twice the risk, and those under 15 five times the risk, of dying in childbirth than women in their 20’s. Indeed, pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death for girls aged 15–19, with over 70,000 dying each year.
Yet child marriage and its consequences are part of a large complex network of household and family strategies and decisions[i]. In many countries where women cannot own their own land, marriage is the only way they can access land and thus food for themselves, and any future children they may bear. In other countries, where dowries are required the higher price of older more educated girls is seen to incentivise the family into early marriage; while in countries where high school fees pertain, young girls are promised to older men in return for these school fees. These young girls are thus driven by poverty and limited bargaining power into unequal relations which are ripe for abuse.
There is thus a need in these societies to create supportive institutional structures for pre-teen and teenage girls enabling them to override the gender roles often imposed upon them by their families and communities to allow them to build the human capital required to function beyond marriage and motherhood, and this is crucially linked with the provision of educational and economic opportunities
References
Brown, G. (2012) Out of wedlock, into school: Combating child marriage through education. London: The Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown;
Malhotra, A., A. Warner, A. McGonagle, and S. Lee-Rife (2011) Solutions to end child marriage: What the evidence shows. Washington, DC: ICRW;
Nguyen, M. and Q. Wodon (2012a) Global trends in child marriage. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Nguyen, M. C. and Q. Wodon (2012b) Perceptions of child marriage as a reason for dropping out of school: Results for Ghana and Nigeria. Washington, DC: World Bank.
UNICEF (2012) ‘Child Marriages: 39,000 every day’. Available from: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_68114.html UNFPA (2012) Marrying too young: End child marriage. New York: UNFPA.
About the Author:
Sarah Harper is Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College.
Opinions of the blogger is their own and not endorsed by the Institute
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