“I’m not happy about this,” says 11-year-old Khatira, sitting in her home in Qala-e-Naw, the capital of Badghis province in north-west Afghanistan. She was sold into marriage to repay debts. “She was healthy before her engagement, but now she is worried and cries a lot,” says her 40-year-old mother, Noor Bibi. When her 20-year-old future husband comes to their home, Khatira runs away. Since her engagement, she has stopped going outside because she “is ashamed of having a husband in front of the other girls,” her mother says. Khatira’s father used to grow wheat and herd cattle before drought forced the family from their rural village.
In Badghis, 95% of the population depends on rain-fed farming and livestock to survive. But droughts, made more frequent and severe by climate change, have taken away people’s incomes. As a result, selling young daughters into marriage to repay debts, feed the family, or pay for medical treatment has become a common way to cope.
“As a mother, I cried a lot, but I knew my husband had no choice,” says Gul Bobo, who does not know her own age, speaking about her two- and five-year-old daughters at her home in Tayz Nawah, a village 12 hours’ drive from Qala-e-Naw. Both girls are engaged to be married. Like many there, Gul Bobo’s husband used to buy seeds each year and rent a tractor or donkey to farm a wealthier man’s land. “I know they are too young to be engaged, but we had no choice – otherwise we would have waited until after 18,” says Gul Bobo. “I expect them to be beaten, but there is nothing I can do about it. And at 14, they will be pregnant.”
Underage brides are often expected to have children once they reach puberty, leading to well-documented health problems in a country where maternal mortality is among the highest in the world. They are also expected to know how to run a household. When they cannot do so like adults, domestic violence from in-laws is not unusual. Five-year-old Nazila’s future husband is 15. According to Gul Bobo, she could leave to live with her in-laws in two or three years.
“I would have preferred for her to be dead rather than be married off to such an old man,” says Bana, the mother of 11-year-old Gulalai, who is engaged to a shopkeeper in his late 40s. Her parents owed him money. The story is always much the same. Gulalai’s father was a farmer, and the family was displaced by crop failure from their remote village in Qadis, Badghis province.
“We have to sacrifice a family member to save the others,” says Gulalai’s father, Niaz Mohammad, who says he would have preferred to wait until his daughters turned 20 to marry them off – instead, four were married as children. The family only eat homemade bread, tea, and wild mallow leaves they gather and boil, using rubbish to make a fire.
When asked about climate change, most people in Badghis do not know what it means. In villages, most live in mud homes, with no electricity besides the occasional solar-powered battery, andThere is little transport apart from the occasional motorcycle. The population depends on so little to survive that ideas like overconsumption or greenhouse gas emissions are completely foreign to them. In a desperate struggle to survive nine years of drought, thousands have left their ancestral villages to look for work in Qala-e-Naw, often without success.
Boys in Badghis play football in April this year. The land is parched even though it is the rainy season.
To feed his family, Mohammad Yawaz, 55, sells ice cream by the roadside for 100 afghanis (£1.20) a day, after spending his mornings collecting cans and bottles with his six-year-old daughter Zubaida. At best, they earn 500 to 1,000 afghanis a month from reselling them.
Every morning, Zubaida, six, who was sold into marriage, collects rubbish with her father to resell in Qala-e-Naw.
Yawaz eventually felt he had no choice but to marry off his eldest daughter, now 15, who has already left for her husband’s home, and Zubaida, who was engaged last year to a 12-year-old boy. His neighbour, Surgul, is in the same situation. In the morning, he collects rubbish with his daughters Zartila, 10, and Bibi Aisha, seven, who are both engaged. The decision to sell Zartila into marriage came after the family endured “three days and three nights with nothing to eat.” Recently, Surgul sold the only battery he had for lighting in his mud home to buy medicine for one of his daughters. A few years ago, he and his wife lost an infant to illness. But this was not always their life. Surgul once had cattle in his village. As droughts hit the area, he sold them. Cattle markets in Badghis are full of men selling their precious animals because they cannot afford to buy fodder to make up for the lack of grass. In some areas, villages have become ghost towns.
Khatera, nine, Jamila, 10, and Alaida, seven, help their father weed a field in Balocha. All have already been sold into marriage.
Some families go to Herat, Afghanistan’s third-biggest city, where the Shahrak-e-Sabz camp houses tens of thousands of displaced people. They come hoping to find humanitarian aid, but it has dried up. Then they resort to selling their daughters into marriage to repay debts. Darellah, 15, lives with her 30-year-old husband, Mollah. Her family was displaced from their village in 2018. That year, Badghis suffered a historic drought, and since 2021, droughts have ruined harvests and starved livestock every year.
Darellah, who is 15 and pregnant, with her sisters Rahimah, 11, and Bibi Zat, nine, both of whom have also been sold into marriage, in their father’s mud house in Herat’s Shahrak-e-Sabz camp in March 2026.
Now pregnant, Darellah is visiting her family. “I am still a child … it cannot be a good decision to be married at that age,” she says. Her sisters, Bibi Zat, nine, and Rahimah, 11, are both engaged but still live with their parents.
Ziauddin, 10, shows the scar left after his father sold his son’s kidney to feed the family.
Their neighbours were all displaced by the drought as well. Bahahuddin, 40, had to sell his land. When he found he could not feed his family by collecting rubbish and begging, he sold his 10-year-old son Ziauddin’s kidney for 100,000 afghanis. He wanted to sell his own but said he was not healthy enough for anyone to buy it. In the camp, stories like these do not raise an eyebrow. Residents say children have often died because they could not access health services. Khomakha, 30, is another neighbour displaced by the droughts. Her husband made a deal to marry off their two-year-old daughter Fatemah only three months after the girl was born. The urgency came because they could not afford the small fee for shared transport to take their eight-year-old son, Ehsanullah, who has blood cancer, to the hospital for a transfusion each week.
Khomakha, 30, sits with her dKhomakha’s daughter, Fatemah, two, has already been sold into marriage, and her son Ehsanullah, eight, is with her in the Shahrak-e-Sabz camp in Herat. Khomakha may never see Fatemah again after she marries and moves to a village 15 hours’ drive away. “I will not be able to afford transport to visit my daughter once she leaves,” Khomakha says.
But life is not much easier for families who stay in their villages. In Khoshkian, Abdul Aziz’s wheat harvest failed seven times in eight years. Over the years of drought, he sold five of his daughters into marriage, for between 90,000 and 150,000 afghanis (£1,000-£1,750), to repay debts.
Mazari, one of Abdul Aziz’s daughters, left home at about 12 or 13. Now 16 or 17, she lives with her husband in his 40s, their two-year-old son, and a baby born just one day ago.
Mazari holds her newborn baby, with her husband, Mirajan, and their son, Khan Ali, in Khoshkian, Ghormach district, in April this year.
“Getting married at 12 was really hard; when I came to his home, I wasn’t able to cook, but my husband and in-laws have been really kind,” she says.
Her younger sisters, aged between three and 13, will live at home until their bride prices are paid. While they weed a field, they remember the years of war when soldiers from the previous government used to shoot from the mountains behind them.
“There was no difference – the previous government’s army shot whether we were Taliban or civilians,” says Shamael, Mazari’s 13-year-old sister. “We feel better now because we are not woken up by fighting.”
Sitting in the field, Shamael’s sisters nod as they continue weeding.
“People cultivate their land for several years. People invested a lot to do so, and there is no harvest, so they are in debt,” Shamael says. “Then some people sell their lands, some sell their daughters – to survive.”
Fawzia, 10, Kabuli, 10, Alima, nine, and Khandia, seven, are sisters and neighbours all sold into marriage by families in Tangi Buzbay, Bala Murghab district, Badghis.
Pregnant 14-year-old Bulbul with her father, Mansour, 35, in their house in Khushkian. After his wife fell sick, Mansour decided he needed a second wife, and, unable to pay the bride-price, he exchanged Bulbul for the daughter of a 45-year-old man, and married her to that man.
There is no law regarding the age at which girls can leave home for marriage. Bride prices range from hundreds to a few thousand pounds and are paid in instalments. Once the dowry is paid in full, the in-laws are free to claim the bride. In many cases, it happens at the beginning of puberty.
“Everything that is happening to us is because of poverty,” Shamael says.
On her wedding day, in the village of Nookhil, Bibi Samia, 14, at first appears calm. She had cried a lot the night before, says her mother. She has remained stoical for hours but, just before she has to leave her home, bursts into tears. “I am not happy because I am very small,” she says.
As foreign aid dries up, programmes that should provide support for these girls are disappearing.
Clockwise from top left: Bibi Samia, 14, cries before leaving home on her wedding day in March. As is traditional, men gather outside the house in Nookhil, Badghis, as a mullah dresses the groom, Fateh Mohammad, 16, while another man recites taranas (Taliban chants) and naats (religious odes). Bibi Samia goes to join her husband, veiled in a cloth as a sign of modesty and protection against the ‘evil eye’, and adorned with banknotes gifted by guests. Bibi and Fateh are welcomed at his home. She will live there now, while he will leave for Iran to find work.
Mark Calder, advocacy director for Afghanistan at the aid organisation World Vision International, says: “Early marriage exposes girls to potentially deadly health risks, but the clinics treating tThey are disappearing as aid is cut.”
The psychological toll on child brides is immense. Despite her crushing poverty, Sara brings her 12-year-old daughter, Aisha, to primary school every morning, walking from the same slum where Khatira lives, on the edge of Qala-e-Naw, after they fled droughts in 2021. Still, Sara’s husband sold Aisha into marriage to a 20-year-old to repay debts; once the debt is paid, she will have to go.
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Aisha, 12, at home with her mother, Sara, and two-month-old brother Ekmatullah in Qala-e-Naw in April.
The bride price has done little to ease the family’s poverty: their rent of 1,000 afghanis has not been paid for two months, and the landlord has told the family to leave. When her last baby was born, Sara had to walk to the hospital because she could not afford a ride. Despite this, Sara says: “I try not to contact the in-laws to ask them for the rest of the bride price, so that Aisha will not have to leave.” Sara cannot speak about her daughter’s impending marriage in front of her, because it makes Aisha cry. She prefers to let her continue quietly doing her homework while she still can.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Child Marriage and Drought in Afghanistan
Beginner Questions
What is this story about
Its about how severe drought in Afghanistan is pushing poor families to marry off their young daughterssometimes as young as 8 or 9to older men in exchange for money The girls often have no say in it
Who is a child bride
A girl under 18 who is married usually to a much older man without her real consent
Why does drought lead to child marriage
Drought kills crops and livestock so families lose their income and food With no money and debts piling up some parents marry off a daughter to get cash or to have one less mouth to feed Some also marry girls off to settle debts
Is this legal
Afghan law sets the minimum marriage age at 16 for girls but the law is rarely enforced especially in rural areas Under international human rights standards marriage under 18 is considered a child marriage
Is it a new problem
No Child marriage has existed in Afghanistan for a long time but the drought and the countrys economic crisis have made it much worse
Advanced Questions
What is a bride price
Its money or goods paid by the grooms family to the brides family In a drought this payment can look like a lifeline to a desperate familywhich is exactly what makes the practice so hard to stop
How common is child marriage in Afghanistan
Even before the recent crisis roughly one in three Afghan girls was married before 18 Since the drought and the Taliban takeover in 2021 aid agencies report a sharp rise with some girls married as young as 8
What are the main harms to the girls
Girls bodies arent ready for pregnancy so childbirth can kill or injure them
They drop out of school and lose their childhood
They face higher risk of domestic violence isolation and poverty
Many develop depression trauma and health problems
Why dont families just refuse
Many parents say they dont want to do it but see it as the only way to keep the rest of the family alive When youre starving and in debt a marriage offer can feel like survival not a choice
