Children at Ara primary school in the South East Zone of Tigray wait in line to wash their hands before lunch in May 2024. The building behind them was damaged in the war when a shell landed in the school playground.
Children at Ara primary school in the South East Zone of Tigray wait in line to wash their hands before lunch in May 2024. The building behind them was damaged in the war when a shell landed in the school playground.
Photo: Mary’s Meals International

Bethlehem Tsegey, 14, smiles brightly as she describes her relief to be back at school. Since Beati Akor Primary School reopened in the Eastern Zone of the North Ethiopian region of Tigray, not all the girls have returned. Two years of war and the region’s worst drought for 40 years killed around 600,000 people and plunged the rest into hunger and poverty. ‘A lot of 16-year-olds are engaged to be married nowadays,’ she says. ‘Some of them were students here at this school.’

In parts of Ethiopia worst hit by drought and food shortages, rates of child marriage rose by 119 per cent from 2021 to 2022, reversing decades of progress, according to the Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative coalition.

The rise has been linked in part to climate disasters. Last year Save the Children reported that two thirds of child marriages were happening around the world in regions hit hardest by climate change. Almost all of Tigray is classed as being in ‘crisis’ with ‘emergency’ food shortage levels. The president of Tigray’s Interim Regional Administration, Getachew Reda, has warned that 91 per cent of people are at ‘risk of starvation’. But Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has denied this, stating in February: ‘There are no people dying due to hunger in Ethiopia.’

Globally, keeping girls in education is seen as a solution to the problem of child marriage. Tigray’s Education Bureau says 74 per cent of its schools are now operating despite national government and allied forces damaging and looting institutions. However, fewer than half of the 2.4 million school aged children in the region have returned. ‘Families are not able to afford food and the related education costs,’ the Bureau’s head Kiros Guesh told New Internationalist. Cases of child marriage, he says, ‘have become rampant because of lack of hope in education’.

For the family of Embza Gebreanania, a softly-spoken 14-year-old boy also at Beati Akor school, the war has left them few options for survival. His father and brother were killed, leaving his mother to care alone for him, a brother and two sisters. Both girls are now engaged, aged 16 and 18.

The local community supports Embza’s mother by providing a small salary to cook at the school. Last year it restarted a school-feeding programme funded by British charity Mary’s Meals International (MMI). Since then the number of children attending has rocketed from 792 to 1,177.

The Bureau sees this as the most successful way to get children back into classrooms. ‘These meals provide long-term health benefits, and of course keep children in school and enable education,’ says MMI founder and CEO Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow.

Bethlehem says eating at school has taken pressure off her parents. Perhaps it will also prevent them from looking for a husband to support her. ‘I want to be a doctor when I’m older,’ she says. ‘During the bad times a lot of people died. I need to serve our people in the future and prevent more deaths.’

Gabriella Jozwiak