Against child marriage
Watch 15-year-old Zalissa share her story about early forced marriage
Child marriage is a traditional cultural practice in developing countries where one in three girls is married off by her family before their eighteenth birthday, according to the United Nations Population Fund.
Stories of child marriages are common. “One evening when I came back from school, my father told me I had been given away in marriage, and I wouldn’t go to school anymore,” says Zalissa, a 14-year-old student from Burkina Faso, in a video posted by Kinderpostzegels Nederland, a Dutch organization working to protect vulnerable children around the world. “This news made me very sad.”
Watch the schoolgirl’s story unfold in Zalissa’s Choice, a Kinderpostzegels Nederland production.