Early marriage in America - Part 1

Anis Albasha

The Washington Post

Before the ongoing disastrous war in Yemen, it really pissed me off that, in the few times the Western media talked about Yemen, it focused on the issue of early marriage as if it were the main problem of the country. The only time I saw the name of Yemen in Sweden was in a magazine’s article about the ‘phenomenon’ of early marriage in Yemen! Ironically, Western media does not speak much about Yemen now though the devastation caused by the war is far worse than the consequences of early marriage. I am not going to talk about that kind of hypocrisy now but I just want to highlight the reasons behind the focus on the topic of early marriage in Yemen years ago.

A long time ago, it was no secret that Yemen, as one of the least developed countries in the Middle East, has been suffering from different grievous problems such as corruption, mismanagement, poverty and illiteracy. Let alone the other issues which are natural results of some negative inherited traditions such as inequality between men and women, tribalism and stratification. Trying to address just one of those issues would be a herculean task which would require enormous efforts by the whole nation. However, local NGOs and CSOs in Yemen have managed to make the issue of early marriage ‘the number one problem’ that requires global attention and international support.

NGOs ‘Non-Governmental Organizations’ and CSOs ‘Civil Society Organizations’ are terms encompassing organizations that are not affiliated by the government or a private company. As not-for-profit organizations, both NGOs and CSOs are supposed to perform a variety of service and humanitarian functions, promote the interests of the poor, provide basic social services, or undertake community development. There are about 3.7 million NGOs around the world. In Yemen, there are almost 14 thousand civil society organizations; most of them are based in Sana’a, the capital while the others are located in different areas.

Unfortunately, most Yemeni CSOs are actually profit-making entities which exploit their identities in order to get personal gains or to promote certain political /religious agendas ‘most NGOs and CSOs in Yemen were established by different political parties or private entities’. In the light of that and with taking into consideration the fact that most of those organizations in Yemen secretly adopt the objective of ‘how to make extra money or to get more benefits’, we can understand the  deliberate intensive focus on the issue of early marriage.

For those organizations, there is no need to address serious problems of the society when it is possible to use other loose and dubious themes which would be able to attract the international community’s attention and to secure plentiful financial support. On the other hand, adopting serious themes like ‘child malnutrition’, ‘illiteracy’ or ‘drought and water scarcity’ would require real work and extra efforts. Moreover, dealing with such serious problems would force local NGOs and CSOs to spend all the donated money they would receive from different parties.

In order to make the most of the funds they have got, most Yemeni CSOs, which I call fly-by-night organizations, choose to proceed with the easiest way. That is to say, instead of addressing a critical matter such as chewing Qat, CSOs would rather raise and magnify an issue like early marriage. Consequently, it would be easier to sell this case to the Western media which cares about such topics more than anything else. Eventually, petitions from local CSOs for funds would be welcomed by the international community.  The question here is, in the absence of effective controlling mechanisms, who is going to be held responsible for spending amounts of money allocated to support combating an issue like early marriage or to address other flimsy themes such as ‘enhancing professional transparency’ or ‘raising democratic awareness among rural women’? And what are the criteria that might be used to measure out the effectiveness and the success of these projects?

To be realistic, no one would expect local NGOs and CSOs in Yemen to have the magic bullet for all the critical problems of the country. However, there were areas in which those organizations could have played an effective role in making the situation much better or less worse at least. For instance, what would be the result of Yemeni CSOs decided to address an issue like street children? I don’t have exact numbers, but I am sure that the number of children whom people see in the streets everyday is much bigger than the number of the girls who got married at an early age. In a government study performed in 2008 and funded by the Arab Council for Childhood and Development, pointed Fuad al-Salahi, the Head of the Research Team, that “despite the fact the number of street children had been increasing, the number of the civil society institutions that deal with this case did not exceed 3 to 5 institutions among 6,000 working institutions in the Yemeni arena”.

Let’s take another serious topic that has been neglected by most Yemeni CSOs, which is child malnutrition. Did local organizations in Yemen have no idea about the horrifying facts regarding this issue, or they just were fully aware of the consequences of early marriage? According to the UNICEF, over one million Yemeni girls and boys under five suffer from acute malnutrition. This fact was stated in the ‘Situation Analysis of Children in Yemen 2014’, which was issued two years before the war. According to this report, child nutrition indicators in Yemen are among the worst in the world. The report mentioned that “another area that is heavily impacting Yemen’s development is magnitude and multiple faces of its humanitarian challenges. Most Yemenis are affected in some way, and around one in three receive humanitarian aid, across areas faced with poor access to water and sanitation, food security and malnutrition. Surveys in 2012 established that acute malnutrition in children is well above the WHO 15 per cent threshold of critical in some area (more than double that rate in Al-Hodeidah).

These are some examples of the fatal issues in Yemen which get zero interest from the local NGOs and CSOs. In fact, I am not diminishing the issue of early marriage which is unfair and horrible. But I find it so ironic to focus on this inconsequential topic in the presence of other issues of grave concern which require urgent attention and deserve to be in the limelight. If those CSOs wanted to do something good for the society, they would adopt the case of delayed marriage which is no less serious than early marriage and even more important.

In the second part of this article, I will talk about my personal experience with some NGOs in Yemen, how I found out about their manipulating approaches as well as about the reason behind my choice of the title for this article.