Married off before 15, kids by 16

Although the minimum age of marriage is 18 years for girls in Bangladesh, this is somehow not applicable to the ones of the Bede community, living on the bank of Savar's Bangshi river.

A large number of Bede people have settled down in Savar municipality near Bangshi river under ward-1. They live in Porabari, Omorpur, Boktarpur, Kanchanpur, Badda and Jamshing. The localities are together known as Bede Para, where only the Bede communities live in large numbers.

Most of the girls in this community are married off before they turn 15. By 18, they are already mothers with two to three toddlers.

For instance, 16-year-old Sohagi is already a mother to two children -- Sakib, currently one year old, and Edarul, who is now four.

Sohagi was married off when she was only 10, to a groom of her community, who was 12 back then. Her husband who has been unemployed since the beginning, cannot make any financial contribution to the family even today.

Sohagi takes care of the family members, including her elderly mother who has a speech impairment. Although earlier, she would entertain people with snake charming, nowadays, she is mostly surviving on alms.

With her meagre income, she pays for a room, rented at Tk 1,500, where her entire family lives.

"Being a mother has become a curse for me. I don't want any other girl to suffer from such poverty," said Sohagi. "We have been living from hand to mouth and keep fighting with each other all the time," she added.

Sohagi promised herself that she will never let her sons get married in their teens and aspires to send them to school.

Sohagi is not alone in this ordeal.

This correspondent interviewed almost 50 girls in the Bede community and found that almost every one of them was married before 15 and some, were even younger.

Nearly all of them are living below the poverty line.

"We married off our daughter Juli at an early age, as we could not support the family in absence of land, food or a permanent income," said Rahima, a 16-year-old mother of two.

Juli has never gone to school in her lifetime. But like Sohagi, she wishes to send her daughters to school, so that they can enjoy their childhood. She hoped that her children would break the intergenerational cycle of poverty with proper education.

Unlike Sohagi and Juli, Subbuhun was lucky, as she could complete her SSC from a school in Agargaon. But she too was married off after SSC and gave birth to her son, after she completed her HSC from Savar University College.

However, after her son's birth, she could not continue her education.

Subbuhun's mother Nazma Begum said she worked hard and came this far. "This is a unique example in our community," said Nazma.

Although the representatives of the local administration, through a committee, are supposed to hold a ward-based monthly meeting to create awareness on child marriage and collect information on the number of child marriages in the respective areas, Md Ramjan Ali, councillor of the ward, failed to give any satisfactory answer on the activity of this committee.

He could not provide any instance where they stopped the marriage of the underage girls of the Bede community either.

"Unfortunately, the committee remains only on paper and needs to be monitored well by the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs. It would be appreciable if more and more NGOs could come forward for the welfare of the Bede community," he said.

Researcher Philip Gain, director of the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), who worked extensively on the Bede community, said, "These marginalised groups need to be settled permanently. Children can't continue studying while roaming. The government should provide land for them."

"There must be special attention for the children of this community and the local administration must do their job properly. The allocated budget for them is currently insufficient and needs to be expanded. At the same time, social safety net programmes must be widened," he added.

National Girl Child Advocacy Forum Secretary Nasima Akhter Jolly, however, emphasised ensuring economic stability, political commitment and education for the Bede community children.