London: Children as young as seven are being sold as child brides in Niger as the country falls into the grips of mass starvation, according to the charity World Vision.

Child marriage is common for a third of girls in Niger, but aid workers claim there has been a spike in families selling daughters they can no longer afford to feed.

Parents have told activists that while they are unhappy with selling their daughters to men for a price of a few goats or other livestock, the exhaustion of family food stocks meant they had no alternative.

Fatima Ismaghail, 13, was rescued from an arranged marriage ‑ made in return for 20 goats ‑ in the Tera district of western Niger by a local judge.

“My father sold me to a man who was 20 years old and my cousin. Nobody told me about it, and I never discussed it with my mother or my grandmother, but I planned to run away if it went ahead,” she said.

“I heard on the radio that young girls are losing their lives when their parents marry them off, because they have children when they are far too young and may die in childbirth. I was very afraid that this would happen to me. I don’t understand why my parents gave me away to be married so young but I would like to get married and have children when I grow up.”

Touayi Oumar, her mother, said she had felt powerless to stop the marriage.

“I’m so pleased that this marriage was cancelled. I want my daughter to be able to choose the person that she marries and it should be somebody that she loves and who makes her happy,” she said.

“What can a child bring to a marriage with a man? Children know nothing of the duties of marriage and having sex with a man is sometimes difficult even for an older women.

“How can a child be expected to do that?”

Fatima Soumana, a child protection officer, said she had discovered a seven-year-old who had been married to a cousin.

Soumana said the family had been affected by a series of tragedies, including the death of the child’s mother while giving birth.

“The girl’s mother died in childbirth and I went to visit the family and to register the birth at the courthouse. An aunt and a seven-year-old girl old came with us,” Soumana said.

“When I asked who she was, the aunt told me she was her daughter-in-law. I realised that the young girl had been sold to the family and married off to their 20-year-old son.”

Launching a public appeal for £5 million (Dh28 million) to feed the stricken nation, the charity said that food shortages were affecting 6.4million of Niger’s 15.5 million people, with up to one million children at risk of starvation.

Aid workers said the crisis, which stretches across the sub-Saharan region after drought and crop failure, would worsen steadily as it faced the lean season of June and July.

Justin Byworth, head of World Vision, said the food crisis was going unnoticed by the wider world despite the horrific consequences.

“Niger has been in a worsening situation since the end of last year but there is no one line of disaster that has been crossed,” he said.

“It is an emergency not a catastrophe, but families are doing extreme things to cope. I have an eight-year-old daughter myself and I could not imagine that happening in a family.”

In a country where laws are regarded as a colonial imposition decades after independence from France, Soumana explained that the legal age for marriage was 15 for girls and 16 for boys.

“In reality, girls are married off as young as seven years old,” she said.

“There are many reasons for early child marriage but the food crisis is making it worse.”

Girls growing up in Niger face a host of disadvantages including an average of four years at school and stunting from a lack of food.

According to a Save the Children survey of 165 countries released this month, it is the worst place in the world to be a mother with a one in 16 risk of dying in childbirth. There is also a one in seven chance the child will die as an infant.