Aid groups warn that forced child marriages could be on the rise globally due to school closures, food insecurity, and economic uncertainty triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In April, TNH travelled to Adamawa, and to Garoua in the North region - more than 1,100 kilometres north of the capital, Yaoundé - to investigate reports that child marriages had increased because of school closures associated with COVID-19 safety measures.

I could have been happy'

Although Cameroon ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which sets a minimum age of 18 for both girls and boys to marry, families often defend child marriages as cultural, or cite a law that allowed girls to be married at 15 or older, according to Nsen Abeng, a Yaoundé-based lawyer.

For 14-year-olds Djouley* and Yawa*, in Maroua, the capital of Cameroon's Far North region, marriage came amidst the school shutdown and the Muslim feast of Ramadan.

Leading rights activists in Cameroon - like Aissa Doumara, who co-founded a branch of the Association for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and Aishatou Bouba, who runs an education non-profit for ethnic Bororo girls called the Cameroon Indigenous Women Forum - are trying to halt the practice.