In the Badghis province of northwestern Afghanistan, impoverished families are arranging child marriages for young daughters to pay off mounting debts and secure basic survival. Climate change impacts have devastated local agriculture, forcing parents to make desperate choices to keep remaining family members alive.
Climate Collapse and the Loss of Traditional Livelihoods
Consecutive years of severe drought have stripped communities of their traditional sources of income, turning once-productive villages into sparse settlements.
Families like that of 11-year-old Hatira have watched their economic stability evaporate. Before the drought forced her family to abandon their village, Hatira’s father farmed wheat and tended livestock. To settle outstanding debts, her family arranged her engagement to a 20-year-old man.
“Before the engagement she was healthy, and now she worries and cries a lot,” said her 40-year-old mother, Nur Bibi. When the prospective groom visits, Hatira hides, and she no longer leaves the house out of deep distress.
The practice of exchanging a bride price—where the groom’s family provides money or goods to the bride’s parents—has deep historical roots across various Afghan communities. While separate from the Islamic mahr property right meant exclusively for the bride, these financial exchanges frequently morph into survival mechanisms for destitute households facing chronic crop failures.
Trading Daughters for Basic Survival
The human toll extends to families with children far too young to comprehend the arrangements. Gul Bobo, a mother living in Taiz Navah, arranged the engagements of her two-year-old daughter Rubina and five-year-old daughter Nazila.
“I know they are too young to be engaged, but we had no choice. Otherwise, we would have waited until they turned 18,” she said, adding that her husband used to buy seeds and rent a tractor or donkey to farm a wealthier landowner’s fields before the harvest failed entirely.
Down the road, families scrape by through extreme measures. Mohammad Yawaz, a 55-year-old father working as a roadside ice cream vendor, earns about 100 Afghanis—roughly £1.20—per day. Yawaz and his six-year-old daughter Zubaйда spend their mornings scavenging tin cans and plastic bottles to generate a modest supplementary income.
Facing unpayable debts, Yawaz married off his 15-year-old daughter and engaged Zubaйда to a 12-year-old boy last year. Neighboring families report similar realities, with parents selling household essentials, lighting batteries, or migrating toward displacement camps near Herat in futile searches for humanitarian assistance.
Historical Context and Intergenerational Debt Cycles
Child marriage and bride-price traditions in Afghanistan predate current political administrations. Efforts to curb the practice date back more than a century; in 1921, King Amanullah Khan issued laws restricting wedding expenses and banning bride-price payments, though enforcement remained uneven.
For families trapped in cycles of repeated crop failures, however, systemic reforms feel distant from daily survival.
In Koshkian, Abdul Aziz watched his wheat harvest fail seven times in eight years. To clear mounting debts, he married off five of his daughters in exchange for sums ranging from 90,000 to 150,000 Afghanis—approximately £1,000 to £1,750.
One of his daughters, Mazari, left her home around age 12. Now 16 or 17, she is raising two children with her husband.
“It was very difficult to get married at 12,” Mazari said. Her younger sisters remain at home, weeding fields while waiting out the years until their own arranged marriages are fulfilled.
