A girl working to feed her child

Radhika Thapa was just 16 years old when she married a 21-year-old boy three years ago. Now, she is expecting a baby and is well into the last months of her pregnancy. This is not the first time she has been with child – her first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages.

“The first time I conceived I was just 16, I didn’t know much about having babies, nobody told me what to do,” Thapa tells IPS in between assisting customers at the vegetable store she runs with her husband in the small town of Champi, some 12 km from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.


"When girls get pregnant their education stops, which means a lack of employment opportunities and poverty." -- Bhogedra Raj Dotel
“The second time I wasn’t ready either, but my husband wanted a baby so I gave in,” she admitted.



After the second miscarriage, Thapa’s doctors urged her to wait a few years before trying again, but she was under immense pressure from her in-laws, who threatened to “find another woman for her husband if she kept losing her babies”.

What might seem like a horror story to some has become an accepted state of affairs in Nepal, the country with the highest child marriage rate in the world.

On average, two out of five girls are married before their 18th birthday. The legal age for marriage in Nepal is 18 years with parental consent, and 20 without, a law that is seldom observed, least of all in rural parts of the country.

Studies show that child marriages occur most frequently among the least educated, poorest girls living out in the countryside.

According to the (NDHS), 17 percent of married adolescent girls between 15 and 19 years are either pregnant or are mothers already. In fact, research shows that adolescent mothers give birth to 81 out of every 1,000 children in Nepal.

The survey also shows that 86 percent of married adolescents do not use any form of contraception, meaning that few girls are able to space their births.


Success Stories

Nepal has made great strides with regards to women’s reproductive health and is applauded for having nearly halved its maternal mortality rate (MMR) from 539 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1995 to 281 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006, according to the NDHS.

The average age of marriage has steadily increased over the years, the government has committed to strengthening youth-friendly services by 2015, a national plan of action for adolescents is being developed by Nepal’s National Planning Commission, and more people are aware of family planning and abortion services.

A joint UNFPA-Nepal programme entitled ‘Choose Your Future’, which teaches out-of-school girls about health issues and helps them develop basic life skills, has now been scaled up to a national level under the ‘Kishori Bikash Karyakram’ initiative.

Under this programme, out-of-school girls in all of Nepal’s 75 districts receive skills training and seed money to go to school. “The most positive outcome of this has been empowering girls to speak up and fight against practices like dowry,” UNFPA Programme Officer Sudha Pant told IPS.
“You are talking about a child giving birth to another child,” Giulia Vallese, Nepal’s representative for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS.