Christina Asima seems tired for a 13-year-old. I meet the shy mannered girl in the remote farming village of Chitera, in the southern African nation of Malawi. She wears a bright pink zip-up shirt and a blue print cloth wrapped up to her chest. Snuggled in that, hugging her side, is a chubby-cheeked baby boy.
My gut assumption is that the infant must be Christina's little brother. I know 8-month-old Praise is actually her son. Still, it's startling when, as we speak, she shifts him around front to nurse.
"I was 12 years old when I got married to my husband," she explains softly. "My mom had run away, so I was forced to get married to help my other siblings."
Despite decades of international and local efforts to curb child marriage, Christina is hardly alone. Across the developing world, it's estimated that one in three girls still marries before age 18; one in nine before age 15. And the numbers are even worse in Malawi.
"When they see a girl child, in our country, you don't think of anything else but marriage," says Faith Phiri, a Malawian trying to change such attitudes. Five years ago she created a non-profit, the Girls Empowerment Network, to challenge the complex mix of culture, economics and sexism that drives child marriage.