Brides Of The Sun: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

Fairfax - Gethin Chamberlain

Everyone has their own idea about what climate change looks like. It's that polar bear adrift on its ice floe. It is an apocalyptic future of cities disappearing beneath the waves. Or it is just a big fat lie.
Hardly anyone would imagine it is a young girl sitting in the doorway of a mud hut in a small African village, nursing her first baby as she watches her friends trot off to school.

Agnes Mposwa, 15, was married at the age of 14 and has a new baby. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

But a new investigation suggests that girl, and millions more like her, are now the human face of climate change.
As rising temperatures and irregular rainfall throughout Africa have brought more drought and flooding, families once able to feed themselves have seen harvests fail year after year.
Eventually, many conclude that there is only one option left: their daughters have to go.

Nine months later, there the girl sits, on the step of her hut, sheltering her newborn baby from the blazing sun and wondering how things turned out this way.
Agnes Mposwa thinks she knows why. "If the climate did not change, then I would be in school now," she says. "I have to accept that my parents tried their best but it failed because of climate change."
Agnes was 14 when she married 18-year-old Simon in Muwawa village in Malawi last year. She is carrying her four-month-old daughter tied to her back. Her parents are tobacco farmers. They used to be able to support the family, she says, but not any more, so they took her out of school. It was her own decision to get married; better that than sit idly at home.
"I decided to find a man who could support my education. But I now regret my decision because he was not able to support me to go to school as I would have expected. It was not a wise decision."

Dried up farmland on the edge of Maseria village, in the Machinga district of Malawi. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

Journalists from the Brides of the Sun reporting project, backed by funding from the European Journalism Centre, travelled to Mozambique and Malawi to track down young girls like Agnes who married when the changing weather forced their families into poverty.
The stories echoed from village to village.
We used to get 50 kilograms of maize from the field and now it's 1 kilogram.
There was a river here. And now it's gone.
We used to have fields and then the floods became a regular event and now we have no fields.
The sea is warmer.
The nights are hotter.
The days are hotter.
Our crops are failing every year.
The fish have gone away.
We don't have enough money to survive.
All they knew was that the weather had changed, and that once they could afford to send their girls to school and now they couldn't.
The families were angry and frustrated but the only solution they could see to make ends meet was marriage. Sometimes it was the parents who made the decision. Sometimes it was the girl herself, unhappy, hungry, hoping that a husband might be the answer.

Filomena Antonio was 15 when she was married. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

That's what Filomena Antonio thought when 21-year-old Momade Churute suggested they wed.
Filomena was just 15, but the family was struggling.
Her father, Antonio Momade Jamal, 50, had been a fisherman in Moma in Nampula province on the east coast of Mozambique all his life. In the good times, the buyers used to travel from the city to compete for the catch. But then the weather started to change and the fish disappeared.
"The climate changed. I see that it is much hotter than in the past years," he says.
Antonio doesn't know why the fish disappeared, though last month scientists published an eight-year study proposing that carbon dioxide was dissolving in sea water to produce a weak carbonic acid which in turn damages the marine ecosystem.
All he knows is that the fishing has gone bad: "In the areas where we used to go, the sea level is rising and the waves are much stronger."
So when Momade came to ask for Filomena's hand, he felt he had little choice but to accept.
"I've seen other neighbours who, because they are struggling, let their daughters get married. I have five other kids who go to secondary school. I have two other daughters, one of 13, another of 11. If a man came to ask for their hand, I would think about it, I would consider it. This man could help me support not only my daughter, but also help my other kids continue their education."

Filomena's father, Antonio Momade Jamal, felt he had little choice but to agree to his daughter's marriage. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

Filomena, now 19, sits next to him, listening. She appears to have accepted her situation as long as it means she can go off to study in the city. She wants to be a nurse.
"Since my father is poor, I thought I would get married so that my husband would help me," she says.
She didn't mind too much: she thought Momade was a beautiful young man, but her priority was to continue studying. So far, the plan is working, but Momade, also a fisherman, is struggling too.
"We have to walk one hour to go to the place where we fish. When we go there and we launch the net, there are no fish," she says.
"I hear people talking about this, the fact that they are catching less and that the poverty is increasing. They say something about the weather."

Kachaso village in the Nsanje district of Malawi. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

In Mozambique, 48 per cent of girls are married by the age of 18 and 14 per cent by 15. In Malawi the figures are 46 per cent and 9 per cent. It puts both countries near the top of the list for child marriage in the world.
World Bank and UNICEF figures show that the 10 countries most affected by climate change in Africa have a combined population of 41 million girls below the age of 18. Of those, at current rates, 22 million will be married by the time they are 18.
Child marriage expert Mac Bain Mkandawire, executive director of Malawi's Youth Net and Counselling, estimates that there are 1.5 million girls just in Malawi facing child marriage as a direct result of climate change.
"I want to highlight that over the years, in the areas that are devastated by floods and drought, a lot of children are being married off because their families are very numerous," he says. "Sometimes, the children are the ones who are choosing to get married so that they can get a better living, even though that is not always the outcome."

Failed crops in the Machinga district of Malawi. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

No one has yet properly counted how many marriages are a result of climate change, he says, "but I would say 30 per cent to 40 per cent of child marriages in Malawi are due to the floods and droughts caused by climate change. Given that there are about 4 or 5 million girls at risk of getting married in Malawi, around 1.5 million girls are at risk of getting married because of climate change-related events. That is a very huge number."
Around the world there are an estimated 37,000 child marriages every day.
Gibson Mphepo, head of programs with environmental think tank Lead Southern & Eastern Africa, says that climate change is playing a significant part.
"There is a link between climate change and early marriage, which is a coping strategy," he says. "There are cases where girls get married earlier as a way of taking off excess members of the family. If there are three girls in the family, they believe that if these girls get married earlier, that means the mouths, the number of people to be fed in that house will decrease."

Ntonya Sande, now 15, was married at the age of 13. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

That's how Ntonya Sande ended up married at the age of 13. A series of reports have blamed changing climate for the increasingly frequent droughts and floods which beset Malawi. It was after particularly severe floods destroyed her parents' crops in 2015 that they decided she should marry.
Ntonya sits bolt upright on a hard wooden chair in the centre of a blue painted room next to a dirt track running through the village of Kachaso in the Nsanje district in the far south of Malawi. She bites her lip and stares out of the window. Outside her husband Sande Chimkangu, 21, tries to distract their one-year-old daughter, Silika.
"The floods took all our harvest," she says. "After that, we were fetching some firewood in the forest and selling it. Depending on what we managed to sell, we were able to buy some maize, which we would use to make porridge."

Sande Chimkangu was 19 when he married Ntoya Sande, pictured with their daughter. Photo: Gethin Chamberlain

"My husband went to my home to ask for my hand in marriage. My parents were the ones who accepted. I wasn't thinking about getting married at that age."
Sande offered them 25,000 Malawian kwatcha (about $45) and 50 kilograms of sugar. It was the first time Ntoya had met him.
"I tried to negotiate, to tell my parents that I wasn't ready, that I didn't want to get married, but they told me that I had to because that would mean one mouth less at the table. Otherwise they would have waited. That's what I believe."
An aunt coached her in what was expected on the first night. She was quickly pregnant. Marriage did little to change her situation. She still has to collect firewood to eat.
After a while, she stops talking, and just bites her lip and looks at the floor.

Links

• Brides of the Sun
• Brides Of The Sun: how climate change is creating a generation of child brides (video)
• Brides Of The Sun (video)
• Brides Of The Sun: Agnes Mposwa (video)