News Source Reports : The Executive Director of the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association (GRPA), Kobe Smith, is calling on the National Assembly to take decisive action in 2026 to abolish all legal provisions that permit child marriage in Guyana, warning that the continued existence of such laws carries far-reaching consequences for the nation’s children.
While the Marriage Act establishes 18 years as the minimum legal age for marriage, it contains exceptions that allow persons under 18 to marry including girls as young as 16 with parental consent, and even younger in circumstances such as pregnancy. Smith argues that these provisions are fundamentally inconsistent with Guyana’s Constitution and must be removed entirely.
“The Constitution incorporates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says we always should do what is in the best interest of children. How could we have provisions in the Marriage Act that are completely inconsistent with that?” Smith said in an interview set to air on SOURCES.
He raised particular alarm over a provision he described as allowing perpetrators of sexual violence against young girls to legally marry their victims.
“The law in a very indirect and hazy way provides for adults who get young girls pregnant to actually marry them. The interpretation you get from it is that you can have perpetrators of violence marrying young girls and that is a problem,” he said.
Smith also highlighted the broader public health and social implications of child marriage, warning that it traps young girls in cycles of early pregnancy, denies them access to education, and strips them of control over their own healthcare decisions.
“How is it that you are going to be having persons below the age of 18 becoming married? They are going to be pregnant, of course that adds to the stats of adolescent pregnancy. We have to be concerned about whether the adults in the marriage will determine, ‘you can’t go to any health centre for a contraceptive’ or ‘you can’t finish CSEC; I don’t want you to go to university,'” he warned.
The statistics paint a sobering picture. According to estimates from Girls Not Brides, 32% of girls in Guyana are married before the age of 18 and 6% before the age of 15, while 12% of boys marry before 18 — figures that place Guyana among the countries with the highest prevalence of child and early marriage in Latin America and the Caribbean.
To drive meaningful change, GRPA and Blossom Inc. are organising a Town Hall meeting to bring together a wide cross-section of stakeholders including parents, the Government, the Parliamentary Opposition, the private sector, religious leaders, and international organisations to collectively address the issue.
Smith was unequivocal in his position: “No person below the age of 18 should be married. 2026 should be the year that these provisions are removed from the Marriage Act.”
