Sale of child brides dooms Zambia to Aids disaster

Elvin Mudyakuvinda is selling her two young daughters to help to feed the other eight children in her care.

She says it is her last remaining option after being forced to sell everything she owned – livestock, household cutlery and clothes – to raise money for food.

Like many Zambians in the drought-hit southern African country, Mrs Mudyakuvinda is caught in a cycle of poverty and hunger.

But as families act out of desperation to seek a "bride price" for their daughters, their actions are plunging Zambia into an Aids crisis that has devastated its social fabric. Once young children are forced into marriages, and sometimes into polygamy, they are exposed to HIV-Aids.

The two Mudyakuvinda girls who are for sale, Memory, eight, and Hildah, 13, have already been taken out of school. Hunger deprived them of the energy to walk the three miles to classes.

Now they help their mother to collect wood to make charcoal, which they try to sell to motorists on the main highway from Lusaka to the southern resort town of Livingstone. But there are no takers: Mrs Mudyakuvinda has not sold any charcoal in almost two weeks.

"This is why I have to marry my children. If anybody comes and wants them and can pay the money I need, they will take them away. It pains me that I have to do this but I have no option," she says.

Suitors would have to pay 600,000 Kwacha (£77) for each of her daughters. This would guarantee her family food for the next few months.

According to Stella Goings, the United Nations children's fund (Unicef) resident director in Zambia, at least 20 per cent of the country's 11 million people are infected with the Aids virus and at the current rate of infection, Zambia could soon have one of the highest levels of HIV infection in the world.

Unicef estimates that at least 75 per cent of all families in Zambia have taken in one or more Aids orphans.

Ms Goings said the world had to realise that the hunger crisis afflicting three million Zambians and at least 14 million people in the southern Africa region was directly linked to Aids.

Any attempt to address the hunger crisis without at the same time tackling the Aids issue was missing the point.

"It's a vicious cycle. It begins with children being sold through child labour, prostitution and early marriages, then ends up with the parents selling themselves to earn money," Ms Goings said.

"The ensuing high-risk behaviour leads to HIV, which then leads to decreased productivity." The crisis had left many parents and their children too sick to farm, which made them dependent on outside aid.

"So if we take HIV out and provide mountains of food, we are not solving the problem. We have to break the Aids cycle and get rid of high-risk behaviour, since people are being forced into this situation," Ms Goings said.

Once in a forced marriage, the girls have to stay married, regardless of the extent of abuse against them by their husbands, because parents cannot afford to pay back the bride prices.

At Simukombo Basic School in the poverty-stricken Kazungula district of southern Zambia, teachers explained how 12 girls of between eight and 13 had dropped out of school to make early marriages to help their parents to get food from bride prices. This plunged the children into the Aids trap immediately.

"We hate Aids. We hate you Aids. You have killed our parents, you have killed our brothers, you have killed our sisters, now you want to kill us and wipe away mankind. We hate you. Go away," the school children sang in a heart-rending song to welcome the film star Roger Moore on a recent visit intended to highlight the emergency. They composed the song as part of an Aids awareness campaign.

At Maunga School, the story was the same. Forty-two children had dropped out of school, many of them girls. The children would go into early marriages.

The parents of 16-year old Irene Simungo died of Aids. She is now being looked after by her frail 70-year-old grandmother who is caring for seven other Aids orphans.

Irene gets up early to go to the bush to collect wild fruits. She then comes back and helps her grandmother with household chores before washing and walking more than two miles to school.

She will soon have to get married to raise a bride price to help her grandmother.

To give to Unicef's southern Africa children's appeal, call 08457 312 312 (24-hour local rate) or go to Unicef's website www.unicef.org.uk/emergency