The People Serving Girls at Risk organization (PSGR) has lamented that the fight against child marriages in Malawi is facing a number of glitches such as lack of finances as well as laxity by authorities in effectively implementing the already existing regulations.
Board chairperson of the organization, Margaret Ali, says it is worrisome that the country has not done a lot in terms of protecting girls from early marriages and other forms of Gender Based Violence (GBV) despite the availability of legal and policy frameworks to help in eradicating the vice.
Ali was speaking in Balaka on Friday during a day-long training on the SADC model law on eradicating child marriages which drew together civil society organizations from the Eastern Region districts of Balaka, Mangochi, Machinga and Zomba with the aim of deepening and capacitating their understand on the SADC model law on eradicating child marriages.
She called on the government, civil society organizations and all stakeholders in the fight to pro-actively collaborate and work together in a quest to deal with the vice.
“As a country, we have policy frameworks that are there to guide us on how best to deal away with such issues. However, we haven’t seen much action in terms of implementation. In fact, the policies are just gathering dust on the shelves,” said Ali.
She further stressed on the need for different stakeholders to properly sort out the policies in order to achieve the course of protecting girls from the jaws of child marriages and other GBV related incidences.
Concurring with Ali, Executive Director for PSGR, Caleb Ng’ombo expressed dismay with the budget allocation towards the fight against the vice, which he said is too little and do not correspond with the work on the ground.
“In Malawi, the rate of child marriages is now at 42% but if you look at the budget allocation for the fight against the vice is a meagre 0.2% of the total budget. I think, this is not enough for a mammoth task that is there such that authorities should consider making upwards adjustments to the budget allocation,” said Ng’ombo.
One of the participants at the training, Francis Kanduwa of a Machinga based non-governmental organization, Global Hope Mobilization, said the training has capacitated him with knowledge and skills on how best to come up with advocacy strategies in as far as the implementation of the SADC model law on eradicating child marriages is concerned.
The SADC model law on eradicating child marriages has objectives to eradicate child marriages in the region, trigger policy reforms and development of revision of substantive laws and serves as a yardstick and an advocacy tool for legislators in the SADC block in an effort to achieve a sustainable goal on eradicating child marriages by 2030.
PSGR held the training with financial support from the United Nations Population Fund-Malawi (UNFPA) and a United Kingdom based organization, Equality Now.
