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Yerima justifying his marriage to a 13-year-old girl.I spoke to Maryam Uwais, chairperson of the Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative, an organization trying to protect the rights of Nigeria's women and children, who told me that, "Over half of the women in the north are married off by the age of 16 and commence childbirth within the first year of marriage.”The young girls suffer multiple health risks from child marriages, Maryam explained, the most prevalent being vesico-vaginal fistula (VVF), in which damage to the pelvis causes urine to drip continuously from the bladder into the vagina. This isn't only physically debilitating, women are often ostracized from their communities for having the condition. Most of the women affected by VVF come from the remote villages of the northern states—states that predominately lack healthcare facilities, such as Yerima’s own Zamfara. A surgeon told Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper that VVF is common “where ignorance and poverty are prevalent” and that it affects “young teenage girls of poor social economic background and women who are delivering babies for the first time.”
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