Ayina Samson was 14 years old when she first learned that friendship comes with a price. At her school in Zomba District, Malawi, she would sit in class watching her classmates unpack and enjoy the foods their boyfriends bought them while her own stomach growled through morning lessons. She went through this routine every day; going to school hungry, coming back home to find no food there and having to attend her daily madrasah (religious school) still hungry. Her widowed mother was doing her best but there simply was not enough to go around.
When her friends suggested getting a boyfriend to solve the problem, she couldn’t see another way out. "I did not know anything to do with relationships, sexual reproductive health or anything outside of what my friends told me,” she said. Without anyone to give her the real facts, she could not make an informed choice. Soon enough, she was pregnant. Her mother, unable to support both her daughter’s education and guarantee her grandchild’s wellbeing, told Ayina she would have to marry the father.
Two hundred kilometres away in Dedza District, Catherine Saidi was sailing through Standard Eight and was one of the brightest students, but things changed when she also got pregnant. Despite sitting her final exams while pregnant and passing with flying colours, her parents, like Ayina’s mother, could not juggle supporting her education and a grandchild. Similarly, Catherine found herself married to the father of her child, who was also just a child like her. When her secondary school placement came through, the desk that should have been hers was given to another student and her dreams were shattered.
The lives of Catherine and Ayina changed for the better when two local community-based organizations recognized these individual stories as symptoms of a broader malaise. Tikondwe CBO in Zomba District did not approach Ayina's situation as an isolated case but as more evidence that peer pressure, lack of reproductive health education and economic vulnerability often makes child marriages seem the easy option. So, they helped Ayina leave the marriage while working with her family to tackle what had made it seem necessary in the first place.
The change started with goats.
Through Tikondwe's livestock program, Ayina's mother received two male and two female goats that completely transformed how their household functioned. The goats meant manure for their backyard garden, which meant they could grow and harvest maize not just for food but also to sell. For the first time in a long time, Ayina could go to school without that gnawing hunger that had driven her toward a boyfriend in the first place. Now sixteen, she is managing both motherhood and her studies, armed with knowledge about peer pressure and reproductive health that she wishes she had had before.
Catherine's journey back to school needed different solutions but the same comprehensive approach. When Grassroots Action and Support Group (GASO) CBO learned about her situation in 2020, they understood that just paying school fees would not fix the family dynamics that had led to her marriage. They worked with Catherine's parents, slowly rebuilding their belief in her education and advocating for her right to keep learning despite being a young mother. When her original secondary school placement was gone, GASO supported her through the tough process of going back to Standard Seven. She passed her repeat Standard Eight exams and got selected to join the same local secondary school.
GASO CBO covered Catherine's fees and school materials when her parents could no longer afford them. They also connected her to youth clubs where she made new friends, learned business skills and picked up farming techniques. This dual approach addressed her immediate educational needs while building her capacity to support herself and her son in the long-term. Today, Catherine knows exactly what she wants, “I want to become a nurse so that I can help my community and also because I admire their uniforms,” she says with a broad smile on her face. After receiving such comprehensive support from GASO, her personal ambition is tied to giving back to her community and supporting other girls.
Both girls have already given back to their friends and communities. Ayina talks to other young girls about resisting peer pressure and staying focused on education, while Catherine teaches fellow youth club members about business and farming. Their experiences have become teaching tools for their communities to show the connections between poverty, food insecurity and child marriage in ways that help prevent other young people from following the same path.
Ayina and Catherine’s stories tell the journey of how local organisations, supported by the Firelight Foundation in Malawi, have used community-driven systems change to address multiple vulnerabilities at the same time. Rather than treating child marriage as an isolated problem, Tikondwe and GASO CBOs recognized it as a symptom of food insecurity, limited economic opportunities, inadequate reproductive health education and families that did not have enough support systems.
As Catherine prepares to join Form Three with dreams of nursing school and Ayina continues her secondary education while raising her child, their journeys prove what is possible when communities come together to address complex challenges. Their transformations represent hope for their individual futures and for community-wide changes in how families think about education, economic security and what young women can achieve. They are a living proof that sustainable change happens when you address causes rather than symptoms in creating real pathways back to young people's dreams.
