How child marriage steals Kenyan girls’ childhoods and futures

What you need to know:

• Girls in pastoralist communities remain vulnerable to early marriage, FGM, poverty and disrupted education.
• Education, stronger civil registration and community action can help protect Kenyan girls from child marriage.

What can you do in three seconds? Count three fingers, sip a glass of water, and blink your eyes. Hardly enough time for anything life‑changing. Yet in those same three seconds, somewhere in Kenya, a girl too young even to spell out her full name is handed over as a wife to a man old enough to be her grandfather. In a flash, her childhood vanishes, replaced by the burdens of adulthood.

Those three seconds are what the United Nations keeps urging the world to guard, to protect a girl’s future. A future Mapema* never had. When the sun dips behind the plains of Kajiado, where she was born and married, her life feels like a wound that never heals. Six years ago, her father stopped seeing her as a child who deserved an education and instead saw her as a bride. 

At just 15, the age when the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics begins to collect adolescent data, he found her a groom and gave her away. “I dropped out of school in class two and just stayed at home. I have never gone back,” she says quietly, through a translator.

A year into marriage, she conceived, but she lost the pregnancy to health complications. Child marriage remains a stubborn risk for girls in Kenya. The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey shows the share of women married before 18 has fallen from 42 per cent in 1993 to 25 per cent in 2022. 

Stolen childhood

Still, each girl’s stolen childhood marks a breach of constitutional rights and protections under the Children Act (2022). Mapema’s early years of play and growth were taken away.

Instead of games with her peers, she shoulders the daily grind of fetching water as a wife. “Here we don’t have boreholes. I go far with donkeys because of the drought and the hot sun. I think El Niño rains will help with the water problem,” she says.

She dreamed of finishing school and becoming a doctor. Now she nurses the pain of solitude with her baby. “My husband is not always at home because we are pastoralists. Sometimes my mother comes to visit me to help take care of my baby,” she says.

Saved by an education

With only a Class Two education, Mapema had no knowledge of how to resist being sold off by her father or where to seek help. Ntengese*, however, had an advantage. She stayed in school longer. But at 17, just after completing high school, her father told her she was to be married.

She was more informed, which gave her the ability to escape with her sister’s help. “Deciding to run from home was not easy, but I overcame it. I reached a nearby shopping centre, asked someone for a phone, and called my sister,” Ntengese recalls. “She sent a motorbike rider to pick me. In the same dirty clothing I had on, I left, and my sister received me.”

Ntengese says she had seen her elder sister, married off young in the interior of Kajiado, living in poverty with her children. Her second sister, nearly forced out of school, had fled to a rescue centre and was at university when she secretly took Ntengese in.

“When I moved to my sister’s place, we had to cut contact so my parents wouldn’t know where I was. Later, my sister told them a chief had rescued me and warned that if they tried to marry me off, the government would intervene,” she says. “Two years later, my parents finally discovered where I was, but by then they were worried. They had been told marrying me off could cost them.”

Ntengese remembers reading the signs of what was coming. “My parents began planning to take me through FGM. I told my sister, and I ran away. She rescued me from FGM and from early marriage again, because the cutting was meant to prepare me for marriage. My sister is now a graduate, and she does everything for me, paying my school fees and mentoring me.”

Today, Ntengese, she is a second‑year university student studying community health and HIV/Aids management.

She says her parents now know she is at the university and have since dropped the idea of marriage. “I feel like I am a hope to many girls from my community because when they see that I ran away and I am now in the university becoming a better person, they know that they can also do it,” she says.

End child marriage

As the world marks the International Day of the Girl Child on October 11, under a call to end child marriage and invest in girls’ rights, Ntengese has a message for parents who still marry off their daughters before 18. “To our African parents: when a girl is born, you see wealth in her. But that is only short‑term wealth,” she says.

In Kajiado, child marriage prevalence stands at 18 per cent for girls married before 18, and 4.5 per cent for those married before 15, according to national statistics. This is two times lower than Tana River, which records the country’s highest rate, 43 per cent of girls married before 18.

But these counties share one common factor: they are predominantly pastoralist communities. And studies show that here, early marriage is more likely where fathers do not own large herds of cattle. Instead, they view their daughters’ marriage as a way of increasing wealth through bride price.

“Among the Maasai, the belief is that once a girl undergoes FGM, she is sent to a man who marries her. Even if she is very young, she is forced to go to her husband. A Maasai girl who has undergone FGM has far higher chances of being married off than one who has not,” says Solomon Kisakui, founder of the Kajiado Youth Empowerment Initiative.

Solomon has made it his mission to fight the harmful practice of FGM in the Maasai community, so that girls can remain in school and pursue their education. “We are seeing a change as more Maasai men are choosing education over child marriage,” he says.

Educated parents

In the view of Hellen Seleyian Sialala, deputy head teacher at AIC Ormankeki Comprehensive School in Namanga, Kajiado, education is the pathway to ending child marriage. Educated parents, she says, recognise the value of schooling and pass that legacy on to their children. 

“My father was educated and he was working with the Ministry of Education as a clerk so, he wanted the best out of us,” she says. “He wanted us to excel in academics since he went through that path and knew the fruits of education. He earned a salary courtesy of being educated.”

After passing her four exams, Hellen joined Kericho Teachers’ College, where she studied for two years before securing immediate employment. She was posted back to her home county of Kajiado, where she began teaching. 

“I thank my parents because they really supported me. I remember when I was in class five, we went home for the holidays,” she says. “Then in January, when we returned to class six, about 12 girls did not come back. In the first, second and third weeks of opening, we kept asking our classmates where they were. Later, we were told they had been married off.”

Floods

Floods too raise the risk of girls being married off. In 2023, for instance, Lokedo* was married during a rainy season. Their village Nanam in Turkana West was cut off. The roads were impassable due to flooding and the seasonal rivers were overflowing with raging waters. “My mother woke me up in the morning. She told me it’s my wedding day. The bridegroom had already arrived,” she said.

To save the girls in unreachable areas, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency-Kenya partnered with the government to capitalise on the power of village anti-child marriage champions. 

They trained 280 of them in Turkana West and each of them was reaching out to 20 others. Child marriage is child abuse and failure by any person to report a case of child abuse is itself defined as child abuse under the Children Act.

Section 145 of the Act further states that a person who has reasonable cause to believe that a child is in need of care and protection may report the matter to the nearest authorised officer. The authorised officer is then required to take the necessary steps to secure a court order for the care and protection of the child in a place of safety or other alternative care provided for under the Act.

Lessons from Iceland  

While Kenya struggles with the burden of child marriage, there are lessons it can draw from Iceland, where the practice is nearly non‑existent. Only 0.1 per cent of marriages occur before the legal age of 18. Iceland’s success is a product of deliberate commitment and policy.

The Gender Equality Act No. 150/2020 requires public institutions to use gender‑disaggregated data in decision‑making. This ensures transparency and accountability, allowing the country to continually assess and refine its laws and programmes from a gender perspective.

A 2023 US Department of State report on Iceland’s human rights practices confirmed that the minimum marriage age of 18 is effectively enforced, with no reports of forced marriages.

Civil registration

Experts argue that tackling child marriage requires strong civil registration. They say birth registration is crucial to tracing those married off while still young.

“Child marriage enforcement is harder without age verification, yet the practice remains widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa,” said David Nzeyimana, a consultant with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office. “That is why it is crucial to have universal registration of all marriages - civil, customary or religious.”

Nzeyimana spoke during the 4th Global Civil Registration and Vital Statistics and Gender Symposium, held from October 15–17, 2025, and hosted by the Kenyan government in collaboration with development partners.

According to Willis Odek, Regional Advisor at the UNFPA Arab States Regional Office, registering every marriage is a decisive step towards ending child marriage. He pointed to Algeria as an example of good practice in reaching women in remote communities.

“The country’s Ministry of Justice operates fully equipped mobile units that rotate through rural areas on fixed schedules to increase registration coverage in pilot regions,” he said.

Odek added that Algeria’s National Statistics Office collects monthly data on marriages and divorces from municipalities and feeds it into a central database, ensuring up-to-date and reliable vital statistics. “Strengthening birth and marriage registration is one of the most powerful ways to protect every child’s right to a childhood,” he emphasised.

In 2022, a Meru High Court overturned a 15-year jail term handed to a boda boda rider who had married a 16-year-old girl, ruling that she had deceived him into believing she was an adult. 

Justice Thripsisa Cherere said the girl had behaved like an adult and that there was no indication she was underage when she agreed to marry Mr Mohammed Hussein. And thus, without documentation to prove age, justice becomes elusive.

Combined strategies

Meanwhile, Juliet Kimotho, Pan African Adolescent Girls Movement Manager at the Graca Machel Trust, argues that ending child marriage requires a combination of strategies.

“While the law works on one side, the economic side also needs to work and that comes with education, skills enhancement opportunities, job awareness, confidence, and leadership building,” she says.

And Ntengese reminds society that: “When you take your girl to school, you have empowered her forever and you will get the biggest dowry you want and a forever source of income compared to when you marry her off with only ten cows for a lifetime.”