Meet Natsiraishe Maritsa, a teenager from Zimbabwe using taekwondo to help girls in her community fight against the practice of child marriage. Although child marriage before the age of 18 has been banned in Zimbabwe since 2016, the practice persists in rural areas, trapping many girls in a cycle of unplanned pregnancies, violence, and poverty.
The daughter of small-scale farmers, Natsiraishe started practicing martial arts when she was five, and dreamed of becoming an Olympic champion. However, when she started losing friends to abusive marriages from the age of 13, Natsiraishe decided to use her sport to raise awareness about the issue.
Despite limited resources, in 2018 Natsiraishe created a foundation ‘Underaged People’s Auditorium’ and set up a makeshift training ground in her parents’ tiny backyard to rally local girls and former classmates for weekly taekwondo lessons. While the physical practice helped the girls to build self-confidence, it was the discussion group after the training that became the real gamechanger.
Natsiraishe invited her former classmates, some who were mothers, to share stories of the abuse they faced in their child marriages. Moved by the power of such personal stories, some of the younger girls have been inspired to go back to school. To date, Natsiraishe’s foundation has helped 40 teenage mothers and young women.
“The role of teen mothers is usually ignored when people campaign against child marriages,” Natsiraishe says, “The young mothers feel empowered from being able to use their stories to dissuade other girls from falling into the same trap.”
An empowered young woman herself, Natsiraishe still fancies a shot at the Olympics and dreams of joining the Zimbabwe air force as an armament engineer.
