International Day of the Girl Child: Nigeria needs to do more

Peace was at her roadside shop located at Festac Gate, Lagos where she sells cooked and peppered cow skin. She looked very sad and dejected as I approached her. Just 20, she is raising her four children from a failed marriage alone.

Lost in her thoughts, she did not notice my presence until I touched her shoulder. She apologised.

Noticing that she was still absent-minded, I asked her what the problem was. Her story centres on her experience as a victim of child marriage.

The young woman, according to her recollection, used to be a bubbly child while living with her poor parents in Imo State. Then, one day in 2014 when she was 13, she returned from the market with her mother and older siblings when her father handed her to a man he called her husband who brought her to live with him in Lagos.

Peace said she knew he was not the right man for her. But she could not shake him off until she had had four children with him.

“My village has a high divorce rate because young girls are forcefully married at a very young age and many eventually leave the men to return to their parents in the village,” she said.

“My worry now is how I will take care of my four children. I was thinking of how to make up their school fees just now,” she explained.

10 years after

It has been 10 years since the world began to mark the International Day of the Girl Child (IDGC), which has drawn attention to issues that concern girls in Nigeria and across the world.

State governments, policymakers and the general public have lent their voices to the campaign for a better life for the girl child. Yet, investments in girls’ rights remain limited and female children continue to face challenges preventing them from fulfiling their potential.