Yemen

30% of girls in Yemen marry before the age of 18 and 7% marry before the age of 15.

As of 2024, Yemen is home to approximately 3.8 million girls and women married before 18. Of these, 1.3 million of them were married before the age of 15. Child marriage is most common in Al-Jawf and Al-Baidha Governorates.

Child marriage is driven by gender inequality and the belief that girls are somehow inferior to boys.

In Yemen, child marriage is exacerbated by:

● Poverty: Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East. Girls are increasingly being married as a source of income (for the bride price) as ongoing conflict drives families deeper into poverty and desperation.

● Trafficking: Reports also mention that girls have been married through “tourist” marriages with wealthy men from the Arab Gulf region, for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

● Level of education: Before the conflict, many parents forced girls to leave school when they reached puberty to help with household chores and prepare them for marriage. Since the conflict started, more than two million children have lost access to schools, making girls more vulnerable to child marriage.

● Family honour: Some parents marry their daughters to preserve family honour, and to protect them from engaging in what the society considers as “shameful behaviour” (preventing them from having any sexual activity outside marriage).

● Gender inequality: Girls in Yemen live in a patriarchal, male-dominated society, and have little power to negotiate their own choices. Article 40 of the Personal Status Law requires a wife’s obedience to her husband and his consent to leave the home.

● COVID-19: Since the outbreak of the war, economic decline in the country and the COVID-19 pandemic, child marriage has exacerbated the vulnerability of children and particularly adolescent girls. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on some of the poorest households in Yemen, where families have lost their income and school closures have meant that families have adopted negative coping mechanisms, such as marrying their daughters for dowry or driving their children to working on the streets, begging, further exposing them to early marriage, gender-based violence and exploitation.

Humanitarian settings can encompass a wide range of situations before, during, and after natural disasters, conflicts, and epidemics. They exacerbate poverty, insecurity, and lack of access to services such as education, factors which all drive child marriage. While gender inequality is a root case of child marriage in both stable and crisis contexts, often in times of crisis, hardship and to protect girls from increased violence.

Yemen remains one of the world’s largest and worst humanitarian crises. After nine years of conflict, millions of Yemenis continue to suffer political instability, a collapsed health system, climate shocks, malnutrition and food insecurity, and disease outbreaks. As of 2023, 21.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, including 9.8 million children, 4.5 million people are internally displaced,

Armed conflict: Child marriage prevalence is on the rise since conflict in the country began. Child marriage has been used as both a coping mechanism to protect girls and sustain families, but also as a way to keep boys away from joining armed groups. Accurate statistics are difficult to collect amidst the ongoing conflict. Child marriage is considered to reduce the cost of caring for girls and offer them better protection through husbands. In addition, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed concern that girls in conflict-affected communities are being forcibly married to members of the Ansar-al-Sharia, a jihadist group associated with Al-Qaeda.

Yemen has committed to ending child, early and forced marriage by 2030 in line with target 5.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The government is due to submit a Voluntary National Review at the 2024 High-Level Political Forum.

Yemen co-sponsored the 2013 Human Rights Council resolution on child, early and forced marriage.

Yemen ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991, which the Committee on the Rights of the Child has interpreted to recommend the establishment of a minimum age of marriage of 18, and acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1984, which obligates states to ensure free and full consent to marriage.

During its 2014 Universal Periodic Review, Yemen’s Minister of Human Rights was commended on taking an active stance against child marriage. Yemen supported recommendations to promote girls’ education as a means of eradicating child marriage and to ensure children can comprehend and establish full, free and informed consent about marriage.

During its 2019 Universal Periodic Review, Yemen supported recommendations to take measures to end the practice of forced and child marriage and accelerate the drafting, adoption and implementation of laws establishing the age of marriage.

In 2019, at the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25, Yemen committed to ending all forms of violence against women and girls by 2030, including early and forced marriage.

At the London Girl Summit in July 2014, the government signed a charter committing to end child marriage by 2020.

Yemen is a partner country of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

In February 2019, at the High-Level Pledging Event for the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen, 80 representative countries, NGOs and Civil Society Organisations came together to raise $2.62 billion dollars (USD) to support those affected by the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

Yemen is a focus country of the UNICEF-UNFPA Global Programme to Accelerate Action to End Child Marriage, a multi-donor, multi-stakeholder programme working across 12 countries over four years.

In 2022, the Global Programme achieved:

30,000 girls participated in life skills or comprehensive sexuality education programmes.

50,000 people participated in group education and dialogues on alternatives to child marriage, gender equality and the rights of adolescent girls.

2,400 girls were supported to enrol and/or remain in education across 16 districts. The Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques (REFLECT) used classes to target child marriage survivors and adolescent girls who did not have the opportunity to attend school, marginalised girls and girls that were affected by conflict and displacement.

8,600 people were reached through various social media platforms on messages surrounding child marring, adolescent girls’ rights and gender equality.

The Ministry of Health endorsed the clinical management of rape.

3,585 survivors of child marriage were provided with multisectoral services and safe spaces.

291 survivors of child marriage were provided with emergency legal aid, including legal counselling and representation in court.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF has initiated peer-to-peer awareness raising support groups, where 10% of adolescent girls have received support and training on issues surrounding gender norms and early marriage. In northern Yemen, UNFPA, in collaboration with the Yemeni Women’s Union and the Ministry of Health, have provided safe spaces for women and girls. Beyond the ongoing security concerns, programme interventions have been met with the challenges of widespread cultural reluctance to assimilate to Western norms and values, where community members are less willing to “empower” girls, as they believe empowering them will make them disrespectful towards their families and culture.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures have hindered UNFPA-UNICEF training and awareness-raising activities. Despite in-person activities having to come to a pause, hotlines and telephone counselling interventions remained available but girls feared that family members were able to listen to phone conversations.

However, the situation in Yemen is not conducive to legislative and policy progress and child marriage is not a priority to the government. UNFPA and UNICEF are working with the de-facto authorities to ensure that the most vulnerable adolescent girls are reached, including in emergency responses.

It is difficult for civil society organisations to operate within Yemen, therefore knowledge about child marriage prevention and response is very limited.

Previously, in January 2014, Yemen’s National Dialogue Conference, a 565-member forum created to establish the building blocks of a new Constitution, recommended that the government set the minimum age for marriage at 18 in accordance with international standards. However, the political crisis in Yemen has paralysed parliamentary action on this.

A powerful group of conservative parliamentarians have opposed setting a minimum age for marriage, arguing that it will lead to immorality, undermine family values and contradict Sharia law.

Yemen Organization for Combatting Human Trafficking implemented a community-led awareness project on the harmful consequences of child marriage in Yemen-Sana’a, but the conflict has made it challenging to continue.

The Safe Age of Marriage project was piloted in 2009 in Amran Governorate. The project covered communities in Al-Sawd and Al-Soodeh districts, where only 8% of girls aged 15-17 attended school.

The Danish Refugee Council has worked with community leaders in Saada to raise awareness about the dangers of child marriage.

Under Article 15 of the amended Yemeni Personal Status Law 1999 there was an amendment to set the minimum age of marriage at 18 years. However, prior to the amendment there was no minimum legal age of marriage.

In 2009, there was an attempt by the Yemeni government to define the marriageable age to protect children from early marriage. This bill hoped to set a minimum age for marriage. It was drafted and approved by the Council of Ministers. However, due to the coup it was not entered into force. The Yemeni government Sharia Legislative Committee has blocked attempts to raise marriage age to either 15 or 18, on grounds that any law setting minimum age for girls is contrary to Islamic law.