Child marriage in Nepal is denying girls education and the country a boost in GDP, but the government is slowly challenging the status quo.

Sajita Tamang was 14 when she got married. She says love had nothing to do with it.

Now 17, Sajita recalls tearfully the pressure put on her by two women from her village to meet a man in the forest one day after school.

“They asked me to hang out with them. I said, ‘No, I have to make dinner and have work to do.’ But they said, ‘Come for a while.’ I didn’t want to but eventually went.”

In the forest near her home in the rural, hilly district of Makwanpur in central Nepal, Sajita was left alone with the 20-year-old man, whom she found out had paid the women to bring her there.

“He said, ‘I really like you – we should get married.’ I said I didn’t want to get married as I had a dream of opening a tailoring shop. He said, ‘I can’t wait for five years. I really like you.’ I don’t know what happened to me. I just got trapped.”

Being alone with a man is enough to ruin a girl’s reputation in the eyes of her community.

Thirteen days after they married, the verbal abuse started. “My husband [came] home drunk and [said] filthy, nasty things to me,” she remembers. “He said, ‘Get out of my house.’”

Sajita’s story is not uncommon. An estimated 10% of girls in Nepal are married before their 15th birthday (pdf) and more than 40% before they turn 18. Nepal is among the countries with the highest rates of child marriage. Nationally, the average age a girl weds is 17.

Sumina Pariyar says she fell in love when she was 15 and married seven months later.

“I used to carry and break stones at the quarry and he worked there too,” says Sumina, who lives in a one-room corrugated iron home on the outskirts of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

When she turned 16, the couple eloped. “We were working together and fell in love and got married,” she says, as she comforts her eight-month-old daughter, Unika, who has a cough and diarrhoea. The family’s home is close to a busy flyover, and piles of rubbish sit beneath its arches.

“I was very young and didn’t know what was going to happen to me, so I just got married.”

After she’d given birth, doctors discovered Sumina, now 17, has a heart problem. This requires expensive medicine and the family has borrowed money to pay for it. They now have debts of more than 15,000 rupees (about £96). Her husband, Bhuwan, who is 18, can earn 200-300 rupees loading trucks with bricks. But the couple are two months behind on repayments.

Poverty, culture and a belief that a girl’s life goals should be marriage and motherhood are the main drivers of early marriage among girls in Nepal.

But the government is attempting to challenge the status quo with a new strategy, announced in March. It comes at a time of renewed global action to end child marriage – defined by the UN as any union before the age of 18.

Two years ago, the UN recognised child marriage as a human rights violation. Each year, early marriage strips an estimated 15 million girls under 18 of an education, while putting their health at risk, their lives in danger and robbing them of a childhood.

According to the World Health Organisation, pregnancy and complications from childbirth are the leading causes of death among 15- to 19-year-olds in poorer locations. In September, the UN general assembly promised to end child marriage by 2030 under the sustainable development goals, the blueprint for the world’s development over the next 15 years.