AU: Child marriage impinges on Africa’s development

Mustapha Kaloko, the African Union Commission (AUC) commissioner for social affairs, says child marriage impinges on the growth of the continent.

The commissioner says it child marriage is a harmful traditional practice with worse effects than Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

“It impinges economically, culturally, medically and on the socio-economic development of the continent,” Kaloko said.

“It is caused by ignorance, lack of understanding and hiding behind what they call cultural issues and I do not think that is the kind of culture we should be encouraging if we are ready to progress towards our Agenda 2063.”

Kaloko said there were many health challenges associated with child marriage such as Vesico-Vaginal Fistula (VVF) and Recto-Vaginal Fistula (RVF).

He, however, said that advocacy programmes, appropriate monitoring and evaluation, are being adopted to ensure that the issue was eradicated on the continent.

“We are going to fight within the limits of the AU and our member states are very happy to work with us in this issue,” said Kaloko.

“We have launched the child marriage campaign in 14 countries and very soon we will do so in another 20 countries.”

“Hopefully by the time we do half or the whole continent we will probably be moving towards the next phase of capacity building and monitoring what is going on,” Kaloko said.

He also said adequate preparation is key to fighting Ebola and other similar epidemics in Africa .

He said this on Friday in Kigali, Rwanda while addressing a media conference on the sidelines of the ongoing 27th Ordinary Session of the AU summit.

Kaloko said that there have been post-ebola plans and meetings to ensure that in case of any re-occurrence the continent would not suffer the same fate it did the last time.

He also said that the epidemic opened the AU to the realisation that Africa could indeed fund itself efficiently through the private sector.

“We have been very active and identified the issue of organisation, funding and readily getting in place the right kind of personnel to send to such crisis situation if it ever happens again,” Kaloko said.

“We discovered the ability and capacity of our private sector in terms of funding and this boosted our activities and the issue of domestic financing for Africa to fund its own programmes.”

He said that the AU had also developed the Africa Volunteer Health Corp (AVOHC), a programme he said had been endorsed by the African Heads of States to address such situations.

“Now we have a corps of about 800 health personnel who are very experienced and when we have issues like this we are confident that all we have to do is to mobilise them and that will be quite fast.”

Kaloko said it took about a month to put together the 855 people that were sent as health workers to ease the crisis in the affected areas.

He, however, said that with a group of health personnel identified in various member states and are trained to handle epidemics it would be easier to mobilise them if any such crisis came up again.

Also speaking on the migrant situation where Africans risk their lives to get to Europe through the Mediterranean, he said advocacy measures were ongoing to discourage them from going.

According to him, many who succeeded only paint rosy but wrong pictures of their lifestyle in Europe which has made it difficult for people to believe that it was a risky mission.

“We have been trying to discourage those rosy pictures that are being painted and there is a lot of education at member state levels on the dangers of migrating to Europe.”

“We are not going to be able to solve the problem of migration here alone, it is a collective, moral and economic responsibility that affects both sides and so we have to work on converting challenges to opportunities.”