Paper short abstract:

We examine the reasons that lead parents to marry off their daughters as a response to climate change in Northern Ghana. We place our analysis at the intersection of climate change and social protection and argue the importance of addressing this phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Farming communities confronted with climate change adopt formal (state-proposed) and informal (individual/family-led) adaptation strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. Informal Adaptation Strategies (IAS) are important because they can have both positive and negative consequences on the well-being of people. On one hand, IAS emerges from the lived realities, resilience, and innovation of local populations and provides insight into new formal adaptation strategies that may work for specific people within specific communities. On the other hand, IAS may pose a risk to the well-being of vulnerable groups and potentially lead to an increase in girl-child marriages. While the effects of climate change on the physical and social environment are well documented, and the effects of poverty on early girl child marriage are equally well documented, there is still a dearth of literature on early child marriage as a response to the effects (e.g poverty) of climate change. This is where we situate our study. We use qualitative semi-structured interviews to examine the decision-making processes and reasons that lead parents to marry off their daughters as a response to the effects of climate change in a rural-farming community in Northern Ghana. We place our analysis at the intersection of climate change, social protection, and the incidence of early girl-child marriages. We argue that understanding this link is crucial and can contribute significantly to our knowledge of early girl-child marriage as well as our ability to address this in Sub-Saharan Africa.