The organization, on its official Facebook account, also warned about the negative impact of early marriages, teenage pregnancy, gender violence, domestic and care work, on the educational and labor trajectories of girls, adolescents and young women.

Under the slogan ‘Investing in the rights of girls: our leadership, our welfare’ Unicef in Cuba accompanies the anniversary with initiatives that promote participation, protagonism and access to opportunities and adequate information for girls and adolescents. In the Caribbean nation, the comprehensive protection of children and their rights is a priority policy, endorsed in the Constitution of the Republic, the Family Code and the recently approved Policy for the Comprehensive Care of Children, Teenagers and Youth.

All of them are documents that promote social and gender norms to create a more equal and inclusive world for them.

Likewise, with the new reform in the Family Code, the Caribbean nation joins Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, as the only countries in the area that do not allow child marriage, considered by Unicef as a violation of human rights.

However, on the International Day of the Girl Child, the focus is on the red spots that still exist and place the youngest girls in a state of vulnerability, gaps that expose gender inequalities in the XXI century, which undermine their proper and normal development.

The figures speak for themselves. According to the Demographic Yearbook of Cuba 2022 of the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), only in 2022 there were 619 marriages of adolescents under 18, with partners older than them and even with men over 50 years of age, in several cases.

In Cuba, more than 18 percent of births correspond to women under 20 years of age.

Although the country’s demographic dynamics are characterized by a low birth rate, the fertility rate of Cuban women under 18 has increased in the last 15 years, particularly in the eastern provinces.

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