Sixty-year-old Fa Tchia sits under a baobab tree in her tiny village of Keur Omar Tounkara in central Senegal and looks into the distance as she recalls a youth and education cut short.

“I really loved school,” she said. “I was learning and using my mind.”

Tchia’s parents forced her to leave school at the age of 13 and marry. Despite her own disappointment over early marriage, the legacy continued. Three of Tchia’s own daughters were married at the ages of 15, 14 and 12. Tchia said it was her husband’s decision and she had no say in the matter.

Despite some advances in the rights of women and girls in West Africa, underage marriage continues to be prevalent in the region.

A report by the United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF) in 2005 said eight West African countries are among the world’s top 20 nations with the highest proportion of married girls aged 15-19. At 60 percent, Niger has the highest proportion of married girls in that age bracket, and Senegal ranks 17 on the list with just under 30 percent.

A human rights question

The UN on Thursday is marking International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is “ending impunity for violence against women”. The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and other women’s rights groups say that girls who marry young are more vulnerable to domestic violence.

They also say that girls who marry early must abandon school, which perpetuates a cycle of ignorance and poverty. They are also more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, must enter into sexual relations before they are ready, and bear children before they are physically mature, the rights groups say. These premature pregnancies can cause obstetric fistulas, a tearing in the vagina that can lead to incontinence, and drive up rates of maternal mortality.

Rights groups say the practice of underage marriage is a direct violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as Article 16 states that “marriage should be entered only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses”. Although many West African countries forbid underage marriage and all have signed or ratified conventions against it, the laws are rarely enforced.

Traditional societies continue to justify child marriage as a positive social norm with social and financial benefits.

This was recently made evident in the rural Velingara province of Senegal when a young girl was arrested for fleeing her arranged marriage after her husband tried to force her to have sexual relations with his brother to hide his own impotence. Her husband filed a complaint and the girl was found guilty and jailed for abandoning the “domestic domicile”.

Local women’s and human rights groups protested the decision and there was a public outcry. The ruling was quickly reversed and the girl was released.

Rethinking traditions

One of the organisations that helped the girl was Tostan, an international NGO that works toward educating women about their health and rights, and empowering communities to abandon harmful practices such as female genital excision and underage marriage.

“We start with a very basic discussion on human rights and look at practices that can lead to girls dying. It makes [communities] reflect on how this does not respect their human rights,” said Molly Melching, the founder of Tostan, which means breakthrough in the local Wolof language in Senegal.

By teaching women about how their bodies function and grow, they come to understand the negative health and societal effects that underage marriage can have.

“They begin to ask themselves ‘should we re-think these traditions’?” said Melching. She said the groups are asked to collectively find ways to address these human rights issues within their communities.

Eventually, the villages make public declarations to abandon underage marriage and excision. In the past decade, 1,100 villages have done this. The continued rate of abandonment is 65-80 percent, according to Tostan.

Keur Omar Tounkara relinquished underage marriage in 2004, meaning that Tchia's grandchildren and great-grandchildren might escape the tradition.

“Before, we gave our daughters to marry at 12 or 13. It was normal, it was the custom here. We had no idea that it could cause these problems,” said one of the elders sitting in a group to discuss the issue."

Now there is a consensus among the villagers that girls should not marry before the age of 18.

"This gives them the chance to go to school, to learn. We want to help them succeed,” said another of the elders. “Our hope is that our daughters will have better futures than that of their mothers.”