October 30, 2020
Some 30 percent of the country’s schools have been built by private philanthropists, Mehrollah Rakhs-hanimehr, director of the organization for renovation and development of schools, has stated.
There are 450 school-building charities in Iran, the state news agency reported him saying August 2.
He said the government actively seeks to attract private sponsors of school construction. While not everyone can afford to build an entire school, he said the state program allows the people to participate even by buying a single brick.
Donors have built more than 320 schools so far and have contributed more than 1.4 trillion rials ($4.7 million at the current rate of exchange), said Javad Hossaini, head of Special Education Organization.
Marriage loans may cause many more child weddings
Some people think the government’s offer of generous loans to newly married couples may be prompting poor fathers to push their young daughters into marriage before they are ready.
Masumeh Ebtekar, the vice president for women and family affairs, recently told the state news agency the rising scale of marriage loans offered by the government might have inadvertently led to the rising number of young girls getting married.
Last December, Majlis Deputy Tayebeh Siavoshi said the number the girls under 15 years of age getting married had risen almost 90-fold in just two years.
The Rohani Administration has provided for growing marriage loans in an effort to show its support for young couples, many of whom have said over the years that they have not gotten married for financial reasons.
Ebtekar said the Rohani Administration is not supporting legislation that would raise the minimum age for girls to wed from the current nine years of age. “In our view,” she said, “reaching ‘intellectual maturity’ is enough for marriage. But, a person less than 13 years of age is truly a child and, if married, would suffer many physical and psychological consequences.”
A bill to raise the minimum age for marriage was rejected last year by the Majlis Judiciary Committee when it drew active opposition from the clergy.
Under Iran’s civil law, girls should be 13 and boys 15 to wed. But the law allows girls as young as nine to be married with the consent of the father.
Based on the Central Bank of Iran’s (CBI) statistics, 31 banks and credit institutions currently offer marriage loans.
If a loan is approved, the couple is committed to paying it back in monthly installments in five years at 4 percent interest, although Iran’s inflation rate has always far, far exceeded that.
The loan amount is doubled for war veterans and their children.
Referring to data from the Central Bank of Iran and the Ministry of Sport and Youth Affairs, Deputy Siavoshi said that, when the marriage loan increased to 600 million rials per couple in 2018 (worth $12,500 at the time on the open market), the number of the applicants for underage marriage showed a nearly seventy-fold increase compared with the previous year. The loan amount was doubled in 2019 to 1,200 million rials per couple (worth $8,600 at the open market rate at that time).
In some remote and mainly poverty-stricken areas of Iran, the marriage loan has encouraged impoverished parents to give away their young daughters to elderly suitors, and pocket a share of the marriage loan, according to many commentators.