On a continent where millions of girls still enter marriage before their eighteenth birthday, Sierra Leone sent its Information Minister to the other side of the world this week to make the case that the tide is turning and that the international community must help ensure it does not turn back.
Minister Chernor Bah arrived in Melbourne, Australia, to lead Sierra Leone’s delegation to the Women Deliver 2026 Conference, one of the world’s most influential gatherings on gender equality, women’s rights and the health and wellbeing of girls. The conference, running from April 27 to 30 in Narrm (Melbourne), marks the first time Women Deliver has been regionally hosted by the Oceanic Pacific — and is taking place at a moment when gender equality gains globally are under mounting pressure from organised anti-rights movements.
Sierra Leone’s presence at the conference this year is substantive, not ceremonial. Minister Bah is serving as Speaker and Co-Chair of a major side event focused on child marriage, engaging directly in some of the most pressing debates on the financing and scaling of solutions to end one of the most stubborn violations of girls’ rights in the world. Back home, those debates have direct meaning for hundreds of thousands of Sierra Leonean girls whose futures still hang in the balance.
The statistics behind Sierra Leone’s child marriage problem are not comfortable to sit with. Thirty percent of girls in Sierra Leone are married before the age of eighteen, and nine percent before the age of fifteen. Those numbers represent not just a policy failure but a structural crisis rooted in poverty, gender inequality, the entrenched influence of traditional institutions, and decades of inadequate investment in girls’ education.
Over half of girls in Sierra Leone with no education are married off before the age of eighteen, compared to ten percent of those with higher education a gap that points directly to schooling as both a driver and a solution. The relationship between education access and child marriage is one of the best-documented dynamics in development research, and it makes every closed school, every unaffordable uniform and every rural community without a secondary institution a factor in the calculation.
Child marriage in Sierra Leone is most prevalent in Koinadugu, Tonkolili, Kambia and Port Loko largely northern districts where poverty is deepest, services are thinnest and traditional norms around girls’ early marriage are most entrenched. FGM, undergone by 86 percent of women and girls in Sierra Leone, is deeply linked to the marriage pipeline through the Bondo Society’s initiation processes, making the child marriage question in Sierra Leone inseparable from a broader conversation about harmful traditional practices and the pace at which institutional reform can outrun deeply embedded cultural structures.
The trajectory is not entirely bleak. Thanks to determined policy work, child marriage in Sierra Leone dropped from 48 percent in 2008 to 30 percent in 2019 a significant reduction driven by legislative attention, education investment and growing civil society pressure. It is progress that few countries at Sierra Leone’s income level have managed to replicate at comparable speed. But it also means that nearly one in three girls is still reaching adulthood through a pathway that denies her choice, often her education, and frequently her health.
The most recent legislative milestone came in 2024. Sierra Leone’s parliament approved the Prohibition of Child Marriage Bill 2024, which includes provisions for enforcing penalties on offenders, protecting victims’ rights, and ensuring access to education and support services for young girls affected by child marriage. The bill finally resolved a long-standing legal contradiction: previously, the Child Rights Act 2007 set the minimum age of marriage at eighteen, but the Customary Marriage and Divorce Act 2009 directly contradicted this by allowing underage children to be married off with parental consent and stipulating no minimum age. The 2024 law harmonised both statutes, making eighteen the unambiguous legal floor.
Law, however, does not change a village overnight. The gap between legislation on paper and enforcement in a chiefdom without reliable courts, police presence or social services is where most child protection frameworks in West Africa quietly collapse. Minister Bah’s appearance in Melbourne is partly about rallying the international financing and technical partnerships needed to close that gap not just in Freetown, but in Koinadugu and Kambia.
Sierra Leone is a co-host, alongside the governments of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, of a session titled “No Time to Lose: Scaling Solutions and Financing to End Child Marriage in Humanitarian Settings and Beyond” — an event exploring how proven, locally rooted strategies to end child marriage can be integrated into humanitarian, peacebuilding and climate responses, bringing together governments, humanitarian leaders, civil society and youth- and women-led organisations.
That co-hosting role positions Sierra Leone not as a passive recipient of international goodwill but as an active shaper of the global agenda on child marriage a country with real experience to share, hard lessons to offer, and a live reform process that the international community has a stake in supporting.
Minister Bah is also participating in high-level engagements on ending violence against women and girls, taking part in the closing plenary, and holding bilateral and strategic meetings with international partners. These meetings matter. International financing for child marriage programming in West Africa has historically been fragmented and underfunded relative to the scale of the problem, and the Women Deliver Conference, with its concentration of funders, UN agencies and bilateral donors, is one of the few venues where a minister can walk directly from a plenary session into a conversation with the people controlling programme budgets.
Sierra Leone’s First Lady, Dr Fatima Maada Bio, has also been confirmed as a speaker at the conference. As President of the Organisation of African First Ladies for Development (OAFLAD), she is sharing her expertise on global action to prevent and heal from child sexual exploitation, abuse and violence. The presence of both a senior minister and the First Lady at the same conference signals a level of institutional commitment to the gender agenda that has few precedents in Sierra Leone’s diplomatic history.
WD2026 is taking place at a time when gender equality is under attack globally, anti-rights movements are gaining strength, and the rights of girls, women and gender-diverse people worldwide face escalating threats. For a country like Sierra Leone, whose child marriage reforms were hard-won against decades of entrenched practice and required sustained political will to advance, the international environment matters enormously. Donor funding for gender programmes has faced pressure in several Western capitals. The global policy consensus on reproductive rights and women’s empowerment is contested in ways it was not a decade ago.
The WD2026 programme is guided by four pathways: confronting systemic injustices, imagining bold feminist futures, forging alliances across movements and sectors, and sustaining momentum long after the conference ends. It is that final pathway — sustaining momentum that will define whether Sierra Leone’s week in Melbourne translates into anything durable for girls in Bo, Makeni and Pujehun.
Over 6,500 advocates from grassroots organisers to policymakers are gathered to share strategies, build solidarity and shape bold feminist futures. Sierra Leone is among the small number of sub-Saharan African governments showing up not just as participants but as leaders of the conversation a positioning that carries both opportunity and responsibility.
The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2024 is real. The drop from 48 percent to 30 percent is real. The commitment being articulated in Melbourne this week is real. But 30 percent is still nearly one in three girls, and in Sierra Leone’s highest-burden districts, it is substantially worse than that.
What the Melbourne engagements need to generate is not applause it is money, technical support, and durable partnerships for the implementation phase that follows legislation. Enforcement infrastructure. Community-level change agents. Safe reporting mechanisms for girls already in or threatened with marriage. Educational pathways that make staying in school a viable, supported choice even in the most resource-poor chiefdoms.
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Sierra Leone has shown the world that it can move its numbers on child marriage. The question that Melbourne must help answer is what it will take to move them the rest of the way and whether the international community is still willing to invest in the answer.
Thirty percent is not a success. It is a waypoint. And the girls still waiting to be protected cannot afford for the momentum to stall at a conference in Australia, no matter how significant the stage.
