Had the village elders not intervened to prevent her parents from marrying her off at 13, Catherine MKandawire would have become another statistic. Malawi has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, with 42% of girls marrying before the age of 18 and 9% before the age of 15.
By avoiding that fate, Ms. Mkandawire was able to get an education, earning an advanced degree in community development. Now 28, she is a climate advocate and leader in UNFPA’s Safeguard Youth Programme, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, which advocates for young people, including protecting girls from child marriage. She believes the best way to do this is to promote the economic empowerment of the most vulnerable girls in a country where the national poverty rate is 52 percent. Poverty can drive families to marry off their young daughters or expose girls to gender-based violence and other harmful practices.
“Most young people, especially girls, lack many things. This makes them easy targets for exploitation,” explained Ms. Mkandawire. “In order for them to be safe, they must be able to make their own decisions. This requires access to opportunities.”
Like UNFPA, it recognizes that livelihoods, sexual and reproductive health, rights and climate change are interlinked. “More extreme weather due to the destruction of our environment brings hunger to communities,” he said. “Since parents cannot feed their children, young people are exposed to high levels of risk, including in their own behavior.”
Ms. Mkandawire decided that she should be a leader not only in protecting and preserving the environment, but also in earning a living to inspire her peers to do the same. She started by planting 2,500 pine trees at the foot of a mountain on family land, then added beehives that produce 20 liters of honey a week, a fish pond surrounded by wild flowers, and a banana farm. The diversification of land use away from subsistence agriculture to a set of smaller, more sustainable activities is paying off. With the money she earns from selling honey, Ms. Mkandawire pays the salaries of five employees, school fees for her two brothers, and supports her elderly parents.
“At first, people were skeptical about this project, but when they saw that it worked to conserve the environment, more young people started coming to learn from me,” he said. “Even the chief of our area donated a piece of land so that the young people could expand the forestry project.”
Building Climate Resilience
Malawi is one of the least electrified countries in the world. According to the World Bank, 11 percent of the population of 18 million is connected to the electricity grid. The world average is 90 percent. In rural areas, 4 percent have access to electricity. This has contributed to deforestation, as people driven by poverty illegally cut down trees in national parks and forest reserves to produce charcoal for cooking and selling. Since 2010, Malawi has lost an average of 42,000 hectares of forest. In 2016, the government committed to restoring 4.5 million hectares by 2030, more than a third of its land area.
Every Saturday, Ms. Mkandawire conducts ‘climate talks’ on environmental conservation and climate change as an entry point for engaging young people on sexual and reproductive health issues. Many of the youth she has trained are now able to pay their own school fees by working in climate-related jobs, which are important in the face of extreme weather events like the recent Tropical Storm Ana.
“Before starting this initiative, burning charcoal was destroying our forests,” he says. “But now that there are many young beekeepers, there is hope that our forests will survive,” he said.
Source: NNN