* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Last Tuesday, Nigeria joined the long list of African countries which have banned female genital mutilation (FGM). This historic moment has come on the back of many years of advocacy from national and international organisations.
At the African Commission summit in Banjul last month, Equality Now had an encouraging conversation with the Nigerian delegates about their country’s specific obligation to enact an anti-FGM law. Without laws against FGM, women and girls have no way of ensuring that they are protected from all forms of violence perpetrated against them.
As it stands, only Sudan, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, The Gambia, Liberia, Mali and Mauritania have yet to join the growing African-led movement towards adopting and implementing strong laws to end this practice.
FGM involves the partial or total removal of the female genitalia. It is an extreme and violent form of discrimination and violates the rights of women and girls to equality, bodily integrity and dignity. As an organisation which has been working on this issue since the early nineties, it is heartening to see the campaign receive support from new actors, committed to ending the practice.
Media attention has increased recently too and a leading player, The Guardian’s Global Media Campaign, has just won a prestigious British Media Award for its fantastic work in several countries around the globe – including in the United States, where we collaborated with The Guardian, change.org and Jaha Dukureh, survivor and founder of Safe Hands for Girls, to call for high-level political engagement to end FGM.
Meanwhile, on the African continent, significant progress has been made by several countries which combine different measures to end FGM. Kenya, where Equality Now has worked for over 15 years, has been leading the way in terms of falls in prevalence.
According to new statistics from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), only 10% of adolescent girls in Kenya have undergone FGM. This is down from the previous figure of 15% and reflects a trend that has seen overall prevalence figures fall to 21% for the country as a whole. Recent DHS statistics from other countries, such as Senegal, show that reductions in prevalence are not limited to Kenya, albeit at a much lower rate of decline of 1% for girls and women age 15-49.
One of the geographic regions where FGM continues to be carried out widely is the North Eastern corner of the African continent. With over 27.2 million survivors, Egypt has the highest number of women and girls in the world who are affected by FGM. The recent first ever case of Soheir al-Batea, a 13 year old Egyptian girl who died after a doctor performed FGM on her, ended up being successful, following a lengthy legal process.
However, the doctor, who was sentenced to two years in prison, is apparently still in hiding, while reports suggest that FGM continues to take place. In a country, where more than 75% of FGM cases are performed by health personnel, it is extremely significant that a medical doctor was convicted.
Supporting efforts to ensure that medical practitioners do not carry out FGM in countries such as Egypt, Kenya and Indonesia in particular, an international coalition of health bodies and civil society organisations recently pledged to be at the forefront of efforts to end this abuse.
This commitment builds on a groundbreaking 2013 report by the United Kingdom’s Royal Medical Colleges and partners, Equality Now and Unite the Union, which provided a blueprint to support the identification, recording and reporting instances of FGM – initially in the UK, but to potentially inform best practice further afield too. Effective early identification and prevention of FGM by frontline workers – something which is already starting to take place in the UK – was at the core of the recommendations made.
It is vital that health personnel around the world fully adhere to their obligation to protect the health and well-being of their patients, which includes not performing FGM and protecting girls at risk, but also ensuring that physical, psychological and emotional care and support is provided to those affected.
Supporting survivors is an area that needs much more financial support. Safe spaces such as Leyla Hussein’s Dahlia Project are incredibly successful, but they are few and far between – particularly in countries with higher prevalence. In Kenya, although the law is being increasingly implemented and instances of FGM are declining, we have almost no support for the country’s millions of survivors.
If this really is going to be the generation where FGM ends, we need to take action at various levels – locally, nationally, regionally and internationally. Essentially, this means ensuring that FGM is prevented, that girls at risk are protected, that support services and safe spaces for survivors are provided and that partnerships and prosecutions take place when necessary.
Mary Wandia is Equality Now's FGM Programme Manager, based in Nairobi, Kenya.
