A charity foundation and a business company held a mass wedding for 50 young couples, who might otherwise be unable to afford the costly affair, as they tied the knot in the southwestern Nimruz province.
The wedding, organized on a low-cost scale in the provincial capital Zaranj and amid worsening poverty, was an effort to set an example in a deeply impoverished society where traditional marriage often involves huge dowries and lavish parties, said Sayed Ahmad Selab, head of the Selab Foundation and among the organizers.
The head of the Selab Foundation stated that the mass wedding will help these betrothed young couples not bear the burden of an expensive wedding.
Home essentials and basic utensils were also gifted to the new couples to begin a new life, Selab added, whose charity had earlier sponsored similar mass weddings in Kabul and Kandahar.
A single-day reservation at a wedding hall would normally cost between $10,000 and $20,000, and some engaged couples have to wait for years to be able to afford the high-cost expenses amid the widespread unemployment rate since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021.
According to Selab, the charity intends to invest in more mass weddings across other remote provinces where thousands of young men cannot afford the crippling wedding expenses.
The head of the charity urged people to avoid the unnecessary norms that hinder young men’s marriages and demanded that families should not ask for unaffordable costs from grooms that they cannot pay off.
Mohammad Sadiq Siddiqi, representative of the corporate company Noorzad Group and the co-sponsor of the mass wedding, also emphasized that and said these acts will help many needy young men to get married and begin a new life.
The Taliban officials in the province have welcomed the sponsorship of the mass wedding in Zaranj and encouraged charity foundations and business companies to organize further ceremonies in other provinces.
