CAIRO: As part of Thursday's International Day for the Girl Child, Egypt's New Women Foundation announced that their campaign “Because I am a girl” campaign will see the Giza Pyramids draped in pink to honor the international day for young girls. The group added in a statement posted on their website that during the campaign period, they would continue “to strengthen gender equality through media and advocacy activities, program initiatives and marketing opportunities.” Egypt's activities are part of this year's inaugural day for the young girls, which the United Nations passed last December to support efforts to end gender discrimination and child marriages. UN agencies have come together to focus on child marriage this year, which is a fundamental human rights violation and impacts all aspects of a girl's life, UN Women said. “Globally, more than one in three young women aged 20-24 years were married before they reached age 18. One third of them entered into marriage before they turned 15,” the women's agency reported. Egypt's efforts are one of many cities participating in the event that will see women's rights activists continue to campaign for and to child marriages. In Egypt, for example, a member of the committee drafting the constitution recently urged for the minimum age of marriage in Egypt be dropped to 14-years-old. “It is permissible for the girl at the age of 9 or 10 to marry," Yassir Barhami said in discussing a woman's sexual reproduction and his interpretation of Islam. The Salafist – ultra-conservative – preacher claimed that under Islam when a girl begins to ovulate she is ready for marriage. At the same time of advocating the marriage age be dropped to 14-years-old, he argued that the Salafist Constituent Assembly is also pushing for a law that denies “slavery against women" in the new constitution.
