Tarime is among the six districts in Mara Region, where child marriage is still being practised, despite campaigns by local and international organisations to stop it.
Joyce, 24, Elizabeth, 21 and Nyamburi, 23, from Susuni Ward are the victims of child marriage. They were forced to marry after undergoing Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Speaking to The Citizen recently, Elizabeth says she got married at the age of 15 and got her first born, when she was 16 years old. She faced some difficulties in raising the child as she did not know what to do for she lacked parental experience.
Besides that, she was about to die when she was giving birth due to excessive bleeding. The cause was a rupture in her reproductive track, but thanks to God she survived.
Elizabeth believes it will be hard to eradicate poverty if outdated traditions and customs are still practised for they violate the rights of women and girls.
She says she has ended up being a single parent of two children after her husband died three years of their marriage. Since then she has no reliable source of income and so she has decided to go back to her parents so that they could help her to raise her children.
According to her, poverty is the main factor for child marriage as most of the parents in Tarime District tend to force their daughters to marry so that they can be paid dowry.
Elizabeth says her parents received nine cows as dowry, believing that the cows would help them get out of poverty, but the level of poverty in her family increased because her parents have also to care for her and her two children.
The mother of two explains that her parents had to sell the cows so that they could get some money for the family upkeep. Even this didn’t help much to change the situation.
Joyce, another victim of child marriage, says she was forced to marry when she was 17 years old. Like Elizabeth, she became pregnant and then gave birth to her firstborn the following year. She says she faced many challenges in taking care of her baby because she was still inexperienced.
Joyce, who is currently expecting her third child, says her husband was killed in a road accident in February. He was a motorcyclist (bodaboda operator).
As a widow she says she has to look after the entire family, including her in-laws, who are too old to work and earn any income.
According to the Kurya tradition, she says the last born son is the one to look after his parents, when they get old. So, since her husband was the last born, she says, she has the obligation to look after her in-laws together with her children.
She says her parents forced her to marry a year after she had undergone the FGM. The reason for this was poverty.
She said her husband paid six cows as dowry whereby her parents used the cows for farming. However, she says her family is still poor as the cows have not helped them much.
She says girls and women in the district fail to fight for their rights because, first of all, they are denied education, which, she believes, is the key to fight for their rights.
“How can someone, who is uneducated like me, fight for her rights? Most of the girls in the district, including myself, have not gone to school as boys do because our parents take us as a source of income. When you are 13 years old, they take you for FGM. After that they will find a man for marry you whether you like it or not,” she says.