One of the NGOs working against MFG is Ayuda en Acción. Its initiatives in Ethiopia and Kenya have made it possible for more than 4,000 girls to avoid this practice each year, according to the DPA news agency.
However, Ayuda en Acción reported that the lack of access to education exposes millions of girls to female genital mutilation, which has worsened due to the closure of schools as a result of the pandemic.
With the aim of avoiding a setback in the progress made in recent years, Ayuda en Acción reinforced the creation of “safe environments” to continue with the work of the clubs and the teaching activity and thus prevent and protect girls from this practice .
In Ethiopia, 74% of the women and girls in the country between the ages of 15 and 49 suffered some form of mutilation.
In that country located in East Africa, the NGO Amref Health Africa implements the project in the Afar region that protects almost 10,000 girls under 5 years of age from mutilation.
“They laid me down and mutilated my genitals. My sister recovered quickly, but I did not. I was very sick and I stayed at home bedridden for three months,” Fatuma Aytele, an Ethiopian, reported, according to DPA.
That woman is now part of a network of activists who visit homes with the intention of raising awareness among families and informing the authorities about possible victims of MFG.
Amref Health Africa sees it as essential to have the support of key actors such as religious leaders.
One of them is Usman Mohammed, a religious leader in Afar, who was unable to prevent the death of his daughter through mutilation. “On the eighth day after her birth, my daughter was mutilated. She got sick and died. Since then, I have been thinking of doing something to end this practice,” he acknowledges.
In Kenya, this practice has been illegal since 2011. However, it continues to be carried out clandestinely: 21% in the case of women and girls between 15 and 49 years old and 11% in girls between 11 and 15 years.
In that East African country, Ayuda en Acción works together with Fundación Kirira. Despite the closure of schools during the confinement, the NGO managed to set up 45 anti-cutting centers in Tharaka, a district in the center of the country, whose motto is “No to mutilation and yes to education”.
The NGO defends the idea that access to education provides women and girls with the opportunity for a better future.
In Kenya, there is the center “‘A Nice Place” (a nice place, in Spanish), a shelter and training center for girls and adolescents rejected by their families for refusing mutilation.
It is currently promoting a signature campaign to raise awareness and increase international funding, which UNICEF estimates at $2.4 billion to phase out MSG in 31 high-priority countries.
From the NGO World Vision, they are committed to a community approach to eradicate mutilations. In Senegal, in fact, this organization works with communities in the Kolda region, where almost all girls and women continue to be victims of this practice.
“For years, women have suffered violence due to the ignorance of our parents and yet we do not deserve this fate that goes against our fundamental rights. Dear parents, know that FGM is a practice that we must get rid of If a girl is protected, an entire village is protected,” says Adja, a spokesperson for a Kenyan public school, quoted by DPA.
Meanwhile, according to an investigation by Plan International in Somalia, a country where there are high rates of FGM, 61% of those surveyed in the towns of Hargeysa and Burao believe that this practice has increased due to the pandemic, while 42% of adults believe that not going to school increased the risk of suffering from it.
In Burkina Faso, although it was banned in 1996, 76% of the country’s women between the ages of 15 and 49 have been victims of FGM, according to Unicef data.
Source: Ambito
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