IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

Child Marriage and gender inequality remain pervasive issues in Africa, undermining the continent’s progress towards development and human rights. This paper explores the complex relationship between Child marriage and gender inequality, examining the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to address the pressing concern. Marriage which is an institution that involves two adults who have a mutual agreement, living together with the consent of both parties and their families. It does not evolve out of force. However, in some parts of Africa marriage comes after the order of tradition that is the parents of both parties reach agreement without seeking the consent of the would be husband and wife, most cases the parents of the bride will just pack the girls load to her husband’s house. Child Marriage can be categorized under the marriage of force which can cause a lot of psychological damage to the makeup of a young girl which is deprived of education and adequate care of parents at a tender age. A child according to Universal human Rights is anyone under the age of eighteen while an Adult is someone above the age of eighteen. Gender inequality is what we can argue that it gave birth to child marriage. In some parts of Africa now and then a girl child is not valued as important as the boy child. A girl child faces a lot of discrimination in the society, she is forced into marriage, made to be a mother a tender age which even pose a lot threat to her health and life span. We have a lot of maternal death record in Africa. Historically child marriage has been in existence from time immemorial and can be dated back to the period we can call dark ages in Africa before colonization which means it pre existed before what can call civilization. We should be amazed that the civilization has not changed some of these traditions that affect the lives of women and girl child in our society. The gender inequality which is prevalent is some parts of Africa which one of the primary cause is poverty and so also is the lack of proper and adequate orientation in our society about the girl child, the need for to be educated and the right to be under parents care till she reaches adulthood. Child marriage can only do more harm to the girl child than good. Therefore this paper is going to look at child marriage which results from Gender inequality, the problems that comes from the causes which also lead to the consequences, we are also going to look at the possible solutions. 

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