Theft Of A Future- Sold Before She Grew Up
Part III — Sold Before She Grew Up
Part of The Theft of a Future
There are circumstances in which poverty enters a household so completely that it begins to determine decisions no parent should ever be required to contemplate. Food becomes a daily calculation, illness becomes a financial catastrophe, and the ordinary responsibilities of raising children are gradually replaced by the struggle to keep them alive. In Afghanistan, where decades of conflict have damaged livelihoods and institutions, the economic pressures facing families have been compounded by the restrictions imposed since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, leaving many households with fewer opportunities to earn an income and fewer services to help them survive.
Yet among the most disturbing consequences of this deprivation is the growing evidence of girls being promised in marriage to settle debts or obtain money, sometimes years before they are considered old enough to leave their families.
In July 2026, Afghan journalists Neda Noran and Atousa Azar published an investigation through Zan Times, in partnership with The Guardian, documenting families in western Afghanistan who had arranged marriages for daughters and granddaughters still in early childhood. The investigation described girls promised to future husbands at ages when they could not possibly understand the arrangements being made on their behalf, while adults negotiated payments intended to relieve debts and provide food for households already struggling to survive.
The circumstances described in that investigation reveal something more complicated than a simple exchange of money. They expose the intersection of longstanding inequalities, desperate economic conditions and the absence of reliable protection for children whose futures are being decided by adults.
A child may be promised in marriage long before the ceremony takes place, with the payment received immediately and the transfer to the future husband's household postponed until she reaches an agreed age. For the family receiving the money, the arrangement may offer temporary relief from creditors or hunger, while for the girl it establishes a claim over her future before she has developed the ability to understand, challenge or escape it.
The debt may be reduced, but the obligation created through the child can remain for years.
The grandmother who fears her granddaughter's eighth birthday
Among the families interviewed by Zan Times was a grandmother identified by the pseudonym Golnar, aged fifty-seven, who was caring for her one-year-old granddaughter.
According to the investigation, the girl's father had accumulated debts and fled from creditors, leaving the family without sufficient resources to feed themselves. In an attempt to settle those obligations, the child was promised in marriage in exchange for 200,000 Afghanis and the cancellation of some outstanding debts.
Half the payment had reportedly been received, with the remainder expected when the child was handed over at the age of eight.
Golnar understood the implications of the arrangement and feared what might happen to her granddaughter after she was taken away. Yet the money had already been used to repay creditors, leaving the family with little apparent means of reversing the agreement.
There is a profound contradiction in the position of a grandmother who recognises the danger facing a child she loves while remaining bound to an arrangement intended to keep the family alive. The transaction may have reduced an immediate financial burden, but it also created another obligation, one whose consequences would be borne by a child who had no part in the original debt.
The girl's eighth birthday, which should have represented another year of childhood, had instead become the anticipated moment of separation from her family.
The same investigation documented another grandmother, Saheb Jan, whose granddaughter had reportedly been promised in marriage when she was only two months old. The agreement was intended to settle debts, with the child expected to leave the family at seven years of age.
In another household, a woman identified as Sabza described how her daughter had been promised in marriage at three years old to settle a debt of 300,000 Afghanis. The girl was seven when the journalists interviewed her mother, who feared that she would be taken away within the following year.
These were not accounts of marriages arranged between adults who had reached an understanding about their future together. They concerned children whose lives had been assigned obligations before they were capable of comprehending them, with financial arrangements establishing expectations that could eventually separate them from the only homes they had known.
The families' poverty deserves examination, but poverty cannot transform a child into a legitimate means of payment. Understanding the desperation surrounding these decisions is necessary to prevent them, while recognising the children's rights remains essential to judging their consequences.
When a schoolgirl becomes a mother
The destruction of educational opportunity creates another pathway through which childhood can disappear.
In Badghis province, an eighteen-year-old woman identified as Sima described how her life changed after the Taliban returned to power. She had completed Grade Six and expected to continue into Grade Seven, but the restrictions on girls' secondary education prevented her from doing so.
Within months, according to her testimony, her father began pressuring her to marry her cousin. She described being beaten repeatedly before accepting the arrangement, and at thirteen she entered a marriage that would shape the remainder of her adolescence.
By the time journalists interviewed her in 2026, Sima had experienced four births, although one of her children had died from pneumonia. She was caring for three surviving children while carrying out household work, collecting water, tending animals and preparing bread.
The sequence of events in Sima's life illustrates how the loss of education can intersect with poverty and family authority, creating circumstances in which marriage appears to replace the future that schooling might otherwise have offered.
Her marriage also served a financial purpose.
According to the investigation, Sima's father owed his brother 200,000 Afghanis, and her marriage to the brother's son was arranged in settlement of that debt. Her husband was unemployed and had travelled to Iran in search of work, returning after several months without securing a sustainable income. The household remained dependent upon whatever food other relatives could spare.
The marriage had therefore not resolved the poverty that helped bring it about.
Instead, Sima had entered adulthood carrying responsibilities for which she had little preparation, while the educational opportunities that might eventually have allowed her to earn an independent income remained unavailable.
Her experience reveals how economic hardship can pass from one generation to the next. A family unable to repay a debt may arrange a daughter's marriage, but the young woman may then enter another household facing the same unemployment and deprivation, with children of her own growing up under similarly difficult conditions.
The transaction changes the family structure without necessarily changing the economic conditions that produced it.
The country where hunger determines the future
The scale of Afghanistan's humanitarian crisis helps explain why economic desperation has become such an important part of the child-marriage discussion.
According to the United Nations' 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, approximately 21.9 million people, representing about 45 per cent of Afghanistan's population, were expected to require humanitarian assistance during the year. Among them were an estimated 11.6 million children.
The crisis reflected overlapping pressures, including prolonged economic weakness, unemployment, food insecurity, climate-related disasters, displacement and the restrictions affecting women's participation in economic and public life.
The figures become more alarming when food insecurity is examined separately.
UNICEF reported that approximately 17.4 million people were projected to experience crisis-level or worse food insecurity during the November 2025–March 2026 period, including 4.7 million facing emergency conditions.
The same humanitarian assessments warned that millions of young children would require treatment for acute malnutrition during 2026.
Such figures describe a country in which economic insecurity is no longer confined to a small section of society. Families who depend upon agricultural labour, livestock, small businesses or daily wages may have little protection against illness, crop failure, rising food prices or the loss of employment.
For households already carrying debts, a further economic shock can remove whatever fragile independence remains.
Yet the economic crisis cannot be separated from the policies that have reduced women's ability to contribute to household income.
When women are excluded from many forms of employment and girls are prevented from completing their education, families lose present earnings and future economic possibilities. A daughter who might have become a teacher, nurse, accountant or business owner is instead denied the qualifications that would have enabled her to support herself and potentially contribute to her family's security.
UNICEF's April 2026 analysis estimated that restrictions on girls' education and women's employment were already costing Afghanistan approximately US$84 million annually in lost economic output, with longer-term consequences for the country's education and healthcare systems.
This creates a damaging cycle in which restrictions contribute to economic dependence, while poverty increases the vulnerability of girls to early marriage.
The exclusion of women from education and employment is therefore not simply a question of individual rights, although those rights should be sufficient reason for concern. It also affects the economic resilience of families and the capacity of the country to recover from decades of instability.
The difference between poverty and responsibility
The temptation to explain child marriage entirely through poverty must nevertheless be resisted, because economic deprivation does not remove the responsibility of adults to protect children.
Afghanistan's child-marriage problem did not begin in August 2021.
Before the Taliban's return, UNICEF had already documented the practice across different regions of the country, identifying poverty, gender discrimination, family decision-making structures and limited educational opportunities among the contributing factors.
A UNICEF-supported study published in 2018 found substantial regional differences in child marriage and reported that fathers were the principal decision-makers concerning marriage in 78 per cent of surveyed households.
The same research documented efforts to reduce the practice, including community education and greater awareness of the importance of keeping girls in school.
This history matters because it prevents the mistaken assumption that the Taliban created every harmful practice now affecting Afghan girls.
Child marriage existed before their return, just as Afghan families, women's organisations, educators and reformers had been working to challenge it.
What has changed since 2021 is the environment in which these longstanding inequalities operate.
Girls have lost access to secondary education, women have faced expanding restrictions on employment and movement, and the humanitarian crisis has weakened the ability of families to withstand financial shocks.
UNICEF warned as early as November 2021 that economic deterioration and the closure of secondary schools were increasing the risk of child marriage, explaining that education often protects girls from harmful survival strategies adopted by families under severe pressure.
It would be equally misleading, however, to portray every Afghan father as someone willing to exchange his daughter for money.
Many families have resisted forced marriage, protected their daughters' education and sought assistance from social workers and humanitarian organisations.
Others have been trapped by debts, unemployment and displacement while attempting to keep their children alive.
The existence of these pressures does not justify harmful decisions, but understanding them is essential if intervention is to offer families alternatives before a child becomes the means through which a debt is settled.
The distinction is important because the prevention of child marriage requires more than condemnation. It requires functioning schools, opportunities for women to earn incomes, effective child-protection systems, access to healthcare and economic assistance that reaches families before desperation begins to determine their children's futures.
The cost carried by a child's body
The consequences of child marriage extend beyond education and economic dependence into the physical and psychological development of girls whose bodies may not yet be prepared for pregnancy and childbirth.
Adolescent pregnancy is associated with increased risks for mothers and babies, particularly where access to prenatal care, emergency obstetric services and qualified healthcare workers is limited.
In Afghanistan, these dangers are intensified by shortages of healthcare professionals, restrictions affecting women's medical education and the difficulties rural families encounter when attempting to reach hospitals.
The July 2026 investigation by Zan Times and The Guardian included interviews with healthcare workers at a hospital in northern Afghanistan who reported that forty-two underage girls had given birth during the first five months of the year.
Among those cases, six girls were experiencing a second pregnancy, eighteen underwent caesarean sections, and two mothers died, although their babies survived.
These figures describe the experience reported at one hospital rather than a national total, but they provide a disturbing illustration of the medical consequences associated with early marriage and pregnancy.
A midwife interviewed for the investigation described treating young patients who had experienced severe complications, including a thirteen-year-old who suffered significant bleeding following a miscarriage.
She also described circumstances in which husbands' refusal to permit caesarean deliveries had contributed to maternal deaths.
Such accounts reveal how early marriage can place girls in situations where their physical health depends upon decisions made by adults who may not adequately understand the medical consequences.
The girl who enters marriage at thirteen may become a mother before completing adolescence, while the educational and economic opportunities that might have enabled her to make independent decisions about her health remain beyond her reach.
Sima's experience provides a particularly painful example of this progression.
By eighteen, she had already experienced four births and the death of one child, while continuing to live in poverty and describing persistent physical pain and exhaustion.
The childhood interrupted by marriage had been replaced by responsibilities that many women encounter only after years of education, employment and personal development.
The girl whose marriage was prevented
Not every story ends with a child being handed over to a future husband, and the cases in which intervention has succeeded deserve as much attention as those that reveal the consequences of failure.
In September 2025, UNICEF USA documented the case of twelve-year-old Farima, whose circumstances had placed her at risk of forced marriage.
Her father had died, her mother was absent, and she was living in a difficult family environment when a UNICEF-supported social worker named Latifa became involved.
Through child-protection intervention, the proposed marriage was prevented, demonstrating how social workers and local support services can protect vulnerable children when they are able to identify risks and respond before an arrangement becomes irreversible.
Farima's experience offers an important contrast to the accounts of girls whose families have already accepted payments or entered binding arrangements.
It shows that the economic and social circumstances surrounding child marriage do not make the outcome inevitable.
A child can be protected when functioning services exist, when trusted adults intervene and when families have access to support that allows them to consider alternatives.
Yet the availability of such assistance remains uncertain in many parts of Afghanistan, particularly as humanitarian organisations face funding shortages and restrictions that complicate their work.
By August 2026, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that Afghanistan's humanitarian response had received less than one-third of the funding required for the year, forcing organisations to reduce services, close facilities and prioritise the most urgent interventions.
The consequences of these shortages are not always immediately visible.
A closed protection centre may mean that a family receives no advice before arranging a daughter's marriage, while the absence of a social worker may leave a vulnerable child without anyone able to recognise the danger surrounding her.
Humanitarian assistance cannot by itself resolve the deeper inequalities that allow child marriage to continue, but it can provide alternatives at the moment when a family believes no alternatives remain.
The childhood that cannot be returned
There is a particular cruelty in arrangements that promise a child in marriage years before she is expected to leave her family, because they transform the remaining years of childhood into a period of waiting for an obligation she never accepted.
A girl promised at three may continue playing with her siblings, attending primary school and living within the familiar surroundings of her home, while the adults around her know that an agreement has already been made concerning her future.
The passing years do not necessarily bring her closer to independence. Instead, they may bring her closer to the date when she is expected to fulfil an arrangement negotiated before she could understand its meaning.
For the families documented in western Afghanistan during 2026, the payments received in exchange for these promises were intended to relieve immediate financial hardship, yet the children's futures remained uncertain long after the money had been spent.
The arrangement might settle a debt, but it cannot guarantee that the child will be safe, educated or able to live independently.
Nor does it necessarily remove the poverty that produced the decision, as Sima's experience demonstrates.
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