NTCHEU, Malawi — As children, Memory Banda and her younger sister were inseparable. With only a year difference in age, they shared many of the same dreams.
That all changed in 2009 when Banda’s 11-year-old sister was forced to marry a man in his 30s who had impregnated her.
“He became a different person,” Banda recalls. “We never played together again because she was now ‘older’ than me.”
His sister’s pregnancy occurred shortly after his return from an initiation camp. In rural Malawi, parents and guardians send their daughters to these camps when they reach puberty to learn about motherhood. and sex—or, more specifically, how to please a man sexually.
After her sister’s marriage, it occurred to Memory that she would be next, along with many of her companions in the village.
Feelings of resistance stirred inside him, he said. “I had so many questions, like, ‘Why should this be happening to such young girls for the sake of continuing the tradition?’”
It was an awakening for the self-described “fierce children’s rights activist,” now 27 years old. She helped in a campaign that, in 2015, led to Malawi banning child marriage.
But law enforcement has been weak and it is still common for girls here to marry young. In Malawi, 37.7 percent of girls are married before the age of 18 and 7 percent are married before the age of 15, says a 2021 government report.
In the past, almost all girls in certain rural areas went to camps, said Eunice M’biya, a professor of social history at the University of Malawi. “But this trend is slowly changing in favor of formal education.”
Banda’s activism began in 2010, when he was only 13 years old, in his small village of Chitera. Despite initial resistance from older women, she encouraged other girls to refuse to go to the camps.
Her activism gained momentum when her path crossed with Girls Empowerment Network, a Malawi-based group lobbying lawmakers to address child marriage. Banda joined forces with the group, calling for the legal age of marriage to be raised from 15 to 18. Other human rights activists, parliamentarians and religious and civil society leaders joined the battle successful. Today the Constitution of Malawi defines a child as any person under 18 years of age.
Banda’s role earned him the United Nations Young Activist Award in 2019. That year, with the support of the Freedom Fund, an international nonprofit group dedicated to ending modern slavery, he founded the Leadership Foundation of Girls to promote children’s rights and teach leadership skills to girls. Her group has helped more than 500 girls avoid child marriage and stay in school or re-enroll.
Last year he shared what he had been doing with Michelle Obama, Melinda French Gates and Amal Clooney during their visit to Malawi as part of the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s efforts to end child marriage.
When the time came to go to the initiation camp, Banda refused. “I just said no because I knew what I wanted in life, and that was to get an education,” said.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in development studies and recently completed a master’s degree in project management. She now works with Save the Children International and runs their children’s rights group in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.
Banda’s next step is to create a vocational school for girls who cannot go beyond high school. “The only thing I want is for girls to live in an equal and safe society,” she said. “Is it too much to ask?”
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