Yemen – Did Badly Designed Aid Rules Lead to a Rise in Child Marriage?

Observers say that in Yemen, aid rules that distribute aid by households have encouraged recipients to create more households by marrying off their daughters while they are still girls.

TAIZ, Yemen — Several years ago, Said Ali married off his 13-year-old daughter Fatima at Al-Malika displacement camp in rural Taiz, due to severe economic hardship.

But recently, when he spoke to Devex by phone, he was still too ashamed to admit it out loud without a justification. “I’m responsible for 11 people in this family. I had to marry her off to help feed us all,” he explained.

Ali, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, is not the only father to have done so. Like most of the 4.8 million internally displaced people in Yemen, Ali relies on receiving humanitarian aid from organizations — cash transfers reaching $100, food supplies, and household furniture.

But the problem is that aid is allocated by the household. Since a married woman and her husband form a new household, Ali was able to use Fatima’s marriage registration to qualify his family for additional assistance. Today, Fatima is 17 years old with two children.

According to camp observers, many fathers have adopted this strategy to increase their aid eligibility, with little regard for the risks facing young girls in a society where poverty, and gender-based violence, are prevalent.

It’s an example of how aid rules developed with good intentions have led to perverse outcomes.

The rise of child marriage

Yemen’s internally displaced population faces one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises, especially as less and less aid is being received – only about a quarter of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ required funding materialized in 2025. This has forced cuts to health, protection, and other essential services for the millions of internally displaced people in frontline areas including Taiz, Marib, and Al Hudaydah.

For women and girls in these displaced communities, the crisis carries an additional layer of risk. Yemen ranked 152 of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum‘s 2021 Global Gender Gap Index, a position it held long before the 2014 civil war broke out. Amnesty International describes Yemen as “one of the worst places in the world to be a woman,” with entrenched patriarchal norms, discriminatory laws, and economic collapse leaving women struggling with restricted mobility and deteriorating access to food, water, sanitation, and health care.

Against this backdrop, child marriage has surged. As early as 2016 — two years into the conflict — the Yemen office of the U.N. Population Fund warned that child marriage has increased, particularly among displaced families, as poverty and insecurity push parents to marry off girls as a perceived coping strategy. A thematic assessment across 11 governorates found more families resorting to early marriage after displacement and loss of income. Yemen now has one of the highest child marriage rates in the world, with conflict-driven displacement and poverty cited as key drivers.

According to multiple sources, distribution of aid based on the criterion of households has been one of the factors driving these child marriages.

When international standards meet local reality

Nahla Al-Maqtari, protection network supervisor at Renaissance Makers Organization, a local NGO, said aid distribution in Yemen’s displacement camps follows international frameworks and humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, and independence.

Speaking to Devex, she cited U.N. targeting guidelines which typically rely on the concept of “household” as the basic criterion for assessing need. In the context of Yemen’s Muslim conservative society, household refers to a family. “These criteria were established for purely organizational purposes and were never intended to become tools of social pressure or incentives for harmful practices like child marriage,” she said.

However, she acknowledged that these international standards — applied across multiple conflict contexts with limited modifications — have proven insufficient for addressing the complex social dynamics in Taiz’s rural displacement areas. “This gap between policy design and social reality has led to unintended consequences, particularly in areas where weak protection systems and cultural norms linking aid eligibility to marital status intersect,” she said.

Yemen is one of few countries in the region without a law that explicitly criminalizes child marriages. Around a third of Yemeni girls are married before age 18, often to much older men. Yet, according to the Human Rights Watch, repeated attempts to set a minimum age for marriage have consistently failed.

Al-Maqtari said that risk assessments conducted by organizations before projects “often focus on logistical and security aspects at the expense of long-term social impacts.” While some organizations did not conduct comprehensive risk studies, “leading to insufficient awareness that families might exploit distribution criteria as justification for reproducing harmful behaviors, including using marriage as a tool to access aid.”

The marriage certificate requirement

Shaef Al-Jabri, director of the Civic Center for Support and Advocacy, which supports hundreds of internally displaced Yemenis, confirmed that legal verification through marriage certificates is mandatory in aid distribution for most programs. “These are international standards formulated by UN entities to comply with local contexts and Yemeni laws,” Al-Jabri said. Attempts by Devex to contact international organizations’ local representatives in Yemen for comments were not successful.

Al-Jabri confirmed that his center conducts social risk analysis to predict potential manipulation or fraud, but he acknowledged these efforts may remain insufficient to counter human exploitation. The organization relies on “field presence and continuous verification and monitoring methods to ensure criteria aren’t exploited in ways that could endanger beneficiaries,” he said, while “special departments for follow up, evaluation, and accountability ensure no violations or abuse result from the support provided.”

Yet, such breaches continue to happen. Amid the hundreds of white tents sprawling across the dry, hot sands of Taiz’s countryside, girls are being married off every day.

Said Ali, Fatima’s father, said that in addition to his own children — some of whom are older than Fatima and married — he has to look after his grandchildren. “All breadwinners in the family are without jobs or income for years. These rations are our only lifeline,” he said.

Other parents were introduced to Devex by relief workers as having resorted to marrying off their young daughters to claim more aid, but most refused to admit they had done so.

Abdul Shakour, projects director at Deem Development Organization, whose aid programs extend to hundreds of displaced Yemenis, said his organization continuously monitors child marriage cases through protection monitoring teams and field researchers. He said that preliminary assessments show a notable increase in these cases within Taiz’s displacement camps in Al-Ma’afer and Ash Shamayatayn districts.

It’s a “negative coping mechanism” that displaced people resort to when facing severe poverty and absence of breadwinners, Shakour said. Like others, he acknowledged that focusing on “family” as a distribution unit has pushed some families to marry off girls to reduce the financial burden or to form new families and obtain additional rations..

Shifting toward vulnerability-based targeting

Having noticed an ongoing pattern of sacrificing young girls in order for their families to survive, local NGOs are increasingly looking for ways to reduce the harm inflicted on those victims.

According to Shakour, the humanitarian system is currently moving toward “vulnerability-based targeting” instead of relying entirely on the traditional family criterion, with priority given to female-headed households or those with disabilities.

“Policies and criteria undergo periodic reviews by humanitarian clusters based on post-distribution monitoring results,” he told Devex, adding that “any criterion proven to cause protection risks or encourage wrong social practices is modified.” He did not share how often such changes happen, or how long they take for alterations to be applied.

Al-Maqtari’s organization is working to implement corrective measures in coordination with relevant parties. These include redefining the “family” criterion “to include the most vulnerable individual cases, and to replace the marital status criteria with proper assessment of need,” she explained.

But she acknowledged that change takes time. “These measures have not been fully implemented yet,” she noted, “leaving gaps in camps that continue to show high indicators of child rights violations, particularly child marriage.”

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Did badly designed aid rules lead to a rise in child marriage? | Devex