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Indonesia still decades away from ending child marriage: UNICEF
As the fourth-biggest contributor to child marriages globally, Indonesia must achieve a seven-fold reduction in prevalence in order to reach the targets set out in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
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Child marriage could end girls' education, destroy their health and put them at a greater risk of violence. (Shutterstock/File)
T
he United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reports many countries are not making progress quickly enough to eradicate child marriage practices in the coming decades, especially as recent crises such as COVID-19 threaten to reverse years of marginal improvements.
Among the countries flagged for this lack of advance is Indonesia, the fourth-biggest contributor to child marriages in the world, according to a report released on Tuesday.
In its study, UNICEF found the global prevalence of child marriages has declined from 23 percent to 19 percent over the past decade, based on data on women ages 20-24 who married before they were 18 years old.
But this improvement is not distributed equally around the world, as South Asian countries such as India, home to one-third of the world’s child brides, had been the main drivers of the global reduction. The region’s prevalence stood at just above 20 percent in 2022.
While at 7-percent prevalence, the East Asia and Pacific region was comparatively lower, UNICEF said the figure had remained relatively stagnant due to the lack of meaningful progress over the past 25 years.
According to UNICEF’s estimates, it would take anywhere between 60 to 80 years for every country in the region, including Indonesia, to bring down child marriage prevalence to less than 1 percent at the current rate, far from the target set by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to eradicate child marriage by 2030.
In a separate report issued in January, UNICEF said Indonesia would need to increase its annual rate of child marriage reduction, currently averaging 2.8 percent over the past decade, by around seven times in order to be able to reach the SDG target.
