App may help put an end to child marriage in Bangladesh

LONDON: A new phone app could be a “game-changer” in the fight against child marriage in Bangladesh, where more than half of all girls are married before they are 18, children’s charity Plan International said.

The impoverished South Asian nation has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage, according to Unicef, despite laws that ban girls under 18 and men under 21 from marrying.

The mobile app being rolled out by Plan and the Bangladesh government aims to prevent it by allowing matchmakers, priests and officers who register marriages to verify the bride and groom’s ages through a digital database.

“If we could get the people involved in the initial stages of marriage on side as well, then there would be no one to solemnise, no one to register and no one to arrange a marriage for a child,” said Soumya Guha, a director at Plan Bangladesh.

“The app could be the game-changer that we need,” he said, adding that it stopped 3,750 underage marriages during a sixmonth trial.

Campaigners say girls who marry young often drop out of school and face a greater risk of rape, domestic abuse and forced pregnancies, which may put their lives in danger.

The app, which has an offline text messaging version for rural areas, gives the user access to a database that stores a unique identification number linked to the three documents.

When one of the numbers is entered, it shows “proceed” if the person is of legal age and a red “warning!” if not.

A hard copy of a birth certificate, school leaving document or national identity card works as age proof, but often parents who want to marry off their children often forge them. — Reuters