0
0
By Correspondent, Harare
As Southern Africa marks a decade since the adoption of the SADC Model Law on Eradicating Child Marriage, growing evidence of continued child abuse, gender-based violence, and exploitation across the region is prompting calls for a more comprehensive approach that addresses the economic and environmental forces placing girls at risk.
Speaking at the SADC People’s Summit 2026 this week, researcher and ecofeminist scholar Dr. Melania Chiponda argued that the region’s efforts to end child marriage can no longer focus solely on legal reform. Instead, she called for a new regional framework that links child marriage prevention, climate justice, and accountability for extractive industries, warning that mining expansion and climate shocks are creating new vulnerabilities for girls across Southern Africa.
Her presentation, Beyond the Model Law: A Decade of the SADC Model Law on Eradicating Child Marriage, Read Through Land, Extraction and Climate Justice, was delivered as stakeholders reflected on ten years of progress under the landmark regional law. The Model Law established 18 years as the minimum age of marriage and provided a framework for protecting children from early and forced marriage.
However, Dr. Chiponda said the context in which child marriage occurs has changed dramatically since 2016.
“The floor the Model Law built still matters,” she noted, but legal protections alone cannot address the deeper reasons why families and girls continue to turn to marriage as a survival strategy.
While acknowledging the Model Law’s historic contribution as the region’s first dedicated framework establishing 18 years as the minimum age of marriage and strengthening protection mechanisms for children, Dr. Chiponda argued that “legal reforms alone cannot address the changing realities facing girls across Southern Africa.”
She pointed to the rapid expansion of lithium, cobalt, graphite, and other critical mineral extraction projects across Southern Africa, noting that mining developments are reshaping rural economies and land-use systems at unprecedented speed.
At the same time, communities are facing recurring droughts, floods, and failed harvests that are eroding household resilience and pushing families toward harmful coping mechanisms.
According to the presentation, displacement caused by mining concessions can remove families from subsistence livelihoods that once enabled girls to remain in school. Mining boomtowns may also create environments where transactional sex, early marriage, and exploitation become more common.
Similarly, climate-induced displacement and humanitarian crises can weaken community protection systems and increase the risks of gender-based violence and child marriage.
According to the presentation, child marriage must be understood not only as a child protection issue but also because of deeper structural forces, including land dispossession, loss of livelihoods, extractive industries and climate-related shocks. Dr. Chiponda noted that the region is experiencing a new extractive era characterised by a critical minerals rush, expanding mining operations and worsening climate impacts, all of which are reshaping rural economies and increasing vulnerabilities for women and girls.
A key message emerging from the Summit was the urgent need to bridge the gap between child protection frameworks and regional “just transition” agendas. Dr. Chiponda observed that discussions on energy transition, critical minerals and green industrialisation often proceed without sufficient attention to gender justice, child protection and the lived realities of communities affected by extraction.
In response, the presentation proposed a set of reforms to modernise the Model Law, including stronger corporate accountability measures for extractive companies, gender-responsive Free, Prior and Informed Consent processes, climate-displacement protocols, integration with just transition frameworks, expanded monitoring indicators and greater protection for land and environmental defenders.
“The Model Law gave the region a floor. A decade on, it needs a foundation fit for the crises ahead,” Dr. Chiponda noted, calling for a more holistic approach to protection, justice and development across the SADC region.
Despite policy gains, child rights organisations continue to report alarming levels of abuse and exploitation affecting children and adolescents across Southern Africa.
According to UNICEF and SADC data, around 30 percent of young women in Southern Africa were married before the age of 18, while nearly one-third of those young brides reported experiencing intimate partner violence. The same data show that one in three girls and women have experienced violence from an intimate partner, while many survivors never seek help.
Recent UNICEF analyses have also warned that progress toward ending child marriage is being threatened by intersecting crises including climate shocks, displacement, economic instability and other structural pressures that affect vulnerable households.
As governments, parliamentarians, civil society organisations and development partners reflect on ten years of progress under the Model Law, Shine Collab urges stakeholders to embrace intersectional approaches that connect child rights, land rights, climate justice and feminist economic justice. Sustainable solutions require addressing not only the symptoms of child marriage but also the systems that perpetuate inequality and vulnerability.
