Climate Change Is Driving a Surge in Child Marriages in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province

Two years ago, in Jaffarabad district in the province of Balochistan in south western Pakistan, a family married a 14-year-old girl to a man nearly three times her age because her father was drowning in debt after floods destroyed the family’s home and farmland.

In 2022, Pakistan experienced unprecedented monsoon rains, leading to devastating floods that affected 33 million people across the country. Balochistan and the southern province of Sindh were among the worst-hit regions, with entire towns and villages submerged. Thousands of families lost their homes and livelihoods overnight. While global attention has shifted away from the tragedy, many are still struggling to rebuild their lives two years later.

The teen’s father, pseudonymously called Farman to protect his family’s identity, told More To Her Story that he regrets his decision deeply. “After the floods, we could barely afford enough food to eat on most days,” he said. Farman’s land, once fertile with rice and wheat, was stripped bare. With no source of income and mounting pressure from the usurer, Farman begged for more time to repay his debts, but rising interest rates only deepened his crisis. 

A relative suggested that he marry off his eldest daughter, called Amna here, in exchange for a fee, referred to as a “bride price.” “I didn’t want this for her, but we had no choice,” said Farman. He received 150,000 PKR, or about $535 USD. He said Amna was a quiet and obedient child, and she became withdrawn after her marriage. She now has a toddler.

Maryam Jamali, co-founder of the Madat Community, a women-led grassroots organisation working on flood relief and rehabilitation in Balochistan, told More To Her Story that the economic fallout from the 2022 floods has driven down “bride prices.” 

“People know families are desperate,” she explained. “They take advantage of that.”

The agriculture sector contributes approximately 23 percent to Pakistan’s GDP and employs 37.4% of the national labour force, according to government data. With 30.5 million hectares of agricultural land—about 47 percent of the country’s total land area—Pakistan surpasses the global average of 38 percent, government data reveals. However, the 2022 floods caused a severe blow to the sector, causing an estimated 800 billion PKR, or $3.7 billion USD, in damages to agriculture, food, livestock, and fisheries. 

The summer of 2022 began with an extreme heatwave and drought emergency. Farmers hoped the rain would bring relief, but it instead arrived as a catastrophe. Not only were standing crops wiped out, but the resulting floods stripped away the fertile topsoil essential for future cultivation. In many areas, stagnant water persisted for months, leaving the soil waterlogged and unfit for farming.

Sikander Bizenjo, co-founder of the Balochistan Youth Action Committee, a youth-led initiative aimed at uplifting rural and vulnerable communities in the province, said that families primarily dependent on agriculture lost not just one year’s income, but their means of livelihood for years to come.

“Most farmers,” he said, “take out loans with interest, and when they’re unable to repay them, they are often pushed to take extreme measures, such as marrying off their underage daughters.”

Despite bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, Balochistan remains largely absent from Pakistan’s broader climate discourse. High poverty rates, underdeveloped infrastructure, and a lack of resources exacerbated challenges during and after the floods. While community-based efforts, like Madat and the Balochistan Youth Action Committee, filled some gaps, the scale of devastation was far beyond what they could address.

In the village of Chowki Jamali in Balochistan, at the border with Sindh, a landless farmer said he had no choice but to marry off his teenage daughter to afford his wife’s medical treatment. 

According to Jamali, the co-founder of the Madat Community, stories like his are widespread in the area. 

Communities on the frontlines of climate change are not receiving the support they need, leaving families with grim solutions. “People are not marrying their daughters because they’re evil, or because it’s a tradition or a custom,” said Jamali. “They simply do not have a choice.”

Already, before the floods, about 12.5 percent of women surveyed in Balochistan, aged 20 through 24, said they had been married before the age of 15, and 45.3 percent of women said they were married before they turned 18, according to a report, “Child Marriage in Balochistan: A Political Economy Analysis,” released in 2021 by the United Nations Population Fund and the Population Council, a nonprofit based in New York. The numbers represented sharp increases from 2010. 

The report’s researchers said: “Over time the practice has also morphed to include marriages of girls as young as three as a means to settle feuds, remove debt, reduce liability, and secure the interests of other members of the household.”

While no official data has tracked the rise in child marriages across the province after the floods, Jamali believes the numbers are significant. “Every farmer in the flood-affected areas who had daughters was forced to marry off at least one or more,” she said. There could be hundreds of child brides across Balochistan presently.

Most of these girls receive little to no education, often dropping out after primary school. In many parts of Pakistan, women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights are rarely discussed due to cultural taboos and conservative norms. As a result, many child brides are unaware of what marriage really entails.

Sidra Ahmed, a gynecologist at Kohi Goth Women’s Hospital in Karachi, equates child marriage with marital rape. More often than not, these girls don’t even understand what’s happening to them, she said, and before they know it, they’re pregnant with their first child. The situation is particularly troubling in Balochistan, where there is currently no law prohibiting child marriage.

Many young brides face physical, emotional, and sexual violence, health experts said. According to Dr. Ahmed, many child brides suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Girls married off due to floods and their aftermath experience compounded trauma. “They require urgent psychosocial support,” Dr. Ahmed said. Unfortunately, for most young brides in Balochistan, such support remains out of reach.

With limited opportunities for upward mobility, their children are likely to remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and illiteracy, experts say. Climate change, then, is not just an environmental issue; it is actively reshaping lives, communities, and futures.

“The climate crisis is influencing everything,” said Bizenjo. “It’s impacting the way you live, communicate, raise your children, and interact with your family.”

Pakistan, already home to an estimated 19 million child brides, is likely to see this number rise as the climate crisis deepens. Last year, UNICEF Pakistan launched a new National Gender Strategy and called for “urgent action” to remedy the problem of forced child marriages, “As long as people do not have alternate sources of income or employment, young girls will continue getting married,” said Jamali. She added that the age of these brides is also dropping. “We’ve even heard of girls as young as 10 being married off.”

With weather patterns becoming increasingly erratic and intense, families across Balochistan live in constant fear of another climate disaster like the 2010 or 2022 floods. Many have yet to recover from past devastation; another catastrophe could push them beyond recovery. This fear has only grown in recent months, as Pakistan experienced an alarmingly dry winter between late 2024 and early 2025, with rainfall levels significantly lower than in previous years, raising concerns of an intense monsoon season this summer.

Following the 2022 floods, Jamali and Bizenjo shifted their focus from immediate relief to long-term resilience. Jamali’s organisation, Madat, has prioritised building climate-resilient housing and addressing the underlying socio-economic vulnerabilities that make communities more susceptible to climate shocks. “If you already don’t have a roof over your head or have untreated chronic conditions, you’re more vulnerable,” Jamali said. “We try to build local resources so people aren’t carrying pre-existing burdens when disaster hits.” She emphasised the urgent need for other organisations to also move from relief-based responses to long-term adaptation strategies, including climate-smart agriculture and alternative livelihoods.

Bizenjo’s Balochistan Youth Action Committee is taking a grassroots approach by educating and empowering local communities. In early May, the nonprofit hosted a two-day summit in Quetta, called “Building Climate Leaders,” and brought together young people from across the province. The summit aimed to help youth understand the dynamics of climate change and adaptation, both in Balochistan and the broader Global South. Through leadership development and localised education, the Balochistan Youth Action Committee hopes to equip these young leaders with the tools to raise awareness and build resilience within their communities before the next monsoon hits.

Experts say that the exclusion of Balochistan from Pakistan’s climate narrative by policymakers, and the silence around the suffering of young girls, has turned child marriage into a quiet emergency. One more climate catastrophe could push this hidden epidemic into tragic overdrive. 

“The thought of another monsoon terrifies me. I don’t even want to think about it,” said Jamali.