After renewing legislation in November 2024, Colombia is now one of 12 countries out of the 33 in Latin America and the Caribbean to ban marriage under the age of 18, following the lead of other countries such as Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Data shows that 4.5 million girls and women in Colombia marry before 18, which equates to about a quarter of the population. Of this figure, approximately 1 million married before their 15th birthday.

This law is pivotal considering the previous backlash towards attempts to make a change. While rights groups have campaigned to end the practice of child marriage in Colombia for 17 years, bills were shot down as many representatives of the country’s more than 100 Indigenous communities opposed the bill, The Guardian reports.

The Effects of Child Marriage

Indeed, this law had a detrimental impact on girls seeing as rates of childhood marriage in girls are about three times higher than for boys. Children living in poverty and rural or Indigenous communities are those who were particularly affected, being forced to drop out of school and likely becoming exposed to domestic violence, according to The Guardian. Therefore, child marriage in Colombia and around the world perpetuates the cycle of poverty by possibly preventing those children from seeking an education that may allow them to take up a tertiary or quaternary profession in the future.

Problematically, child marriages were often between girls in poverty and an older partner with economic power. While it is crucial to address child marriage to reduce poverty, it is still “most common in the world’s poorest countries and the poorest households.” Girls from poor families are twice as likely to marry before 18 as girls from wealthier families, and the girls who marry young are more than twice as likely to remain poor.

Food insecurity and malnutrition may lead to child marriage as families with limited food resources may try to marry their daughters to ease food concerns. Moreover, a lack of education can also be a fundamental barrier to the welfare of young girls in low-income communities. Girls with no education are three times as likely to marry by 18 as those with a secondary or higher education.

Positive Future Implications on Poverty

The approval of the law is an important first step toward positive change. It will lead to a national education program that gives young people the tools they need to think about their futures. Therefore, while poverty often exacerbates child marriage, programs that provide families with income-generation opportunities or financial support have the potential to tackle the roots of the problems that led to child marriage from the outset.

These initiatives and the new law could hopefully protect girls from child marriage and facilitate broader efforts to shift social norms. However, while this paves the way for improvements, there is still a long way to go. For example, Plan International stresses the importance of promoting equal rights for girls and adolescents in Colombia.

Overall, while November 2024 marks the beginning of legal change regarding child marriage in Colombia, ongoing efforts are necessary to shift social norms and move focus away from child marriage and into education systems. Child marriage, a byproduct of the economic strain of poverty, means that more work is necessary fix the roots of the problem. Indeed, investing in education systems and providing economic opportunities to impoverished communities can help resolve such issues.

– Amani Almasri

Amani is based in Durham, UK and focuses on Good News for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr