FROM SCHOOL TO MARRIAGE, AND FROM MARRIAGE TO SCHOOL: NOURA’S EXPERIENCE
Noura is a 15-year-old girl who lives with her mother, grandmother and three younger sisters in the Central African refugee camp of Mbile, Kentzou sub-division in the East region of Cameroon. When she was 6 years old, she and her grandmother fled the war in their country of origin to find refuge in Cameroon and were resettled in the Mbile refugee camp, leaving her parents and sisters, who a few months later were also able to find refuge in another camp in the eastern region of Cameroon, (that of Gado) some 310 km away. When she was informed that her entire family had escaped the war and was now safe, she had hopes of seeing them all again, but unfortunately this hope was shattered by the death of her father, which prompted her mother and younger sisters to join her and her grandmother two years later.
Although this reunion was the answer to her prayer, she had to face the precariousness of life in the camp with her sick mother and her very old grandmother for more than 7 years. Nevertheless, with the help of these women, despite their condition, she had an exceptional motivation to always go to school and helped them to look for wood to sell to pay the required for her studies and she always obtained good results. “Our family is very poor. Since our father died and we moved here, I always thought that if I go to school, I would have the chance to get a job to help us all” she says. However, this will was not enough, because under the pressure of an increasingly difficult life, the weight of her grandmother’s age, her mother, diminished by illness and barely able to feed the whole family, could no longer pay Noura’s school fees. This desperate situation led the 32-year-old woman to agree to marry her 14-year-old daughter to a man over 30 years old. “He promised my mother and my grandmother who could no longer do hard labour that he would help them start their small business, , and that this would help them and my little sisters. So, my mother thought that this was the only way to escape poverty and save our family, despite my categorical refusal. Now she knows that she was wrong, she knows it,” says Nourra.
The teenager who was forced to drop out of school knew that science, math and reading aloud, subjects she loved, were over for her. Gone too was her dream of becoming a nurse. “I was very sad; I cried and didn’t eat anymore. But I had to respect my family’s decision” she says. The marriage was sealed in the mosque after an agreement between her uncle, who also lives in the camp, the imam and her “husband”. Having left her family, friends, and school to live with her “husband” in a neighboring village against her will, this moment, which lasted about two weeks, was, as she describes it, “the worst moment of my life”. Forced to have very painful sex, she had to flee one day when her husband was away to her family, who unfortunately forced her to return home. “This hell I could not live anymore. I had to run away from our own house to hide with a woman from our community because my uncle wanted to make me go back because of the dowry that had been paid to them” she says. Having heard about an organization that fights against early marriages, she approached the members of the Community-based Child Protection Network (RECOPE) after an awareness-raising session at the palace: “I remember that when I listened to them talking about girls’ rights, I knew at that moment that there was hope for me”. she says.
From that moment on, Alice, a member and president of the RECOPE group, accompanied by Angèle, a social worker from the Association for Assistance to Development (ASAD), undertook to mediate with Noura’s family, the Imam and the village chief, arguing that this type of marriage was forbidden by law and that the young girl had the right to pursue her education freely. This led to the dissolution of the marriage by the Imam Aboubakar in front of the whole community. “It was with the case of this little girl that I was edified and since then I have become a member of RECOPE. I continue to raise awareness in the mosque, and I have already stopped the celebration of marriages of six girls under 18 years in this community,” reassures the imam, who is also president of the Association of 14,000 refugees in the Mbile camp.
Like Noura, many girls are denied their right to continue their education in favor of forced marriages in the country. In the Eastern region, the proportion of girls married before the age of 18 is as high as 56 per cent, and the massive displacement of people from CAR exacerbates the negative effects on child protection.
To address the deprivation of children, particularly girls exposed to violence of all kinds, UNICEF, through a consortium of NGOs, has set up community-based mechanisms for the protection and education of these children in 6 communes of the East Region. In 2022, child protection networks (RECOPE) were formed to raise awareness and identify cases of violence. To enable young girls to continue their studies, Enrollment and Attendance Monitoring Committee (COSIF) have made it possible to keep children in school. All these interventions under community guidelines benefit from the remarkable support of community leaders who play a very important role in mobilizing communities.
A program to strengthen the community system to combat the practice of child marriage has also been developed. This training program is aligned with the national multisectoral action plan for the abandonment of child marriage in Cameroon for the period 2020–2024, with the recommendations resulting from the national advocacy campaign aimed at parliamentarians, community leaders and clerics to inspire their commitment to ending child marriage. The results of this capacity building program will feed the discussions and action points of the national platform for the coordination of actors for the abandonment of child marriages set up since January 2016.
Today, thanks to RECOPE’s interventions, Noura has returned to school and has received school kits distributed by UNICEF. A strategy to reduce the cost of access and retention of the most disadvantaged children in school because by reducing the financial burden on vulnerable families, including refugees like Noura’s family whose poverty levels are increasing, by providing these materials to children, UNICEF hopes to encourage them to continue educating their children. She is now pursuing her dream of becoming a nurse, and her good grades in school show that this dream is still possible, as with an average of 14/20, she is 4th in her class of over 100 students.
By Fabrice Coula, Communication Officer, UNICEF
