Egypt: Child marriages lead to birth of 250,000 babies each year

Some 250,000 children are born to minors in Egypt, an official at the country’s Ministry of Health announced yesterday.

“The marriage of minors leads to the birth of 250,000 children every year,” Vivian Fouad told reporters at a conference organised by PLAN International, an independent children’s rights and girls’ equality organisation.

“Egyptian law does not criminalise child marriage but prohibits its registration,” the ministry’s coordinator of National Strategy for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) pointed out.

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On her part, the Secretary-General of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, recently said that the government is currently seeking “to criminalise child marriage”.

According to official data by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), there are around 38 million children in Egypt, 19.6 million of whom are boys and 18.3 million are girls. They make up 40 per cent of Egypt’s total 94 million population.

In 2017, CAMPAS revealed that 119,000 girls were married before the age of 18.