Azza Abdel Hamid Ezzat is in her early 20s but has already given birth four times. Ten years ago when she reached puberty, her father decided it was time she got married; he gave her away to the first suitor who came knocking on their door. It mattered little to him that the prospective groom was in his mid-30s at the time (more than twice Azza’s age) or that the bride-to-be had never actually met him.

“I was only 12 at the time, and he’d spotted me buying cookies from a small kiosk at the end of our street. When my father told me I had a suitor, I was excited about wearing a long, white dress and wanted to be a bride like the celebrity brides I’d seen in films and drama serials on TV,” Azza recalled. She did not think about what her life would be like after the wedding.

The second eldest of nine children (four of whom are girls), Azza and her sisters had never gone to school as “our family was too poor to afford it — only the boys in our family got an education.”

But it was not just poverty that kept Azza and her sisters out of school. “The only school in our village was some distance away from home, and my father worried about us making the journey to school back and forth every day.” So Azza had stayed home, looking after her younger siblings and helping her mother with the household chores.