News from Kuria – Ending female genital cutting has highs and lows

Thursday 29 January 2015

Our Knowledge and Programmes Co-ordinator is in Kuria, Kenya this week with Programme Director of our partner Feed the Minds. They’re working with ECAW who are implementing a two year programme in Kuria, which started in January 2014. Katy, FTM’s Programme Director, sent us this guest blog, which tells us a lot about how difficult social change can be.

“Feed the Minds has been in partnership with Education Centre for the Advancement of Women (ECAW) in Kuria, Kenya on the Tanzania border for over 6 years.  In Kuria, the majority of girls and women undergo female genital cutting (FGC) and ECAW is working with local communities to bring about an end to this practice.  Since 2014, we are in partnership with Orchid Project bringing new expertise on FGC.

I am currently with ECAW for the six-monthly support visit and am meeting young girls and women, parents, community leaders, teachers, church leaders, law enforcers and many other community members.  In Kuria the cutting of girls and women takes place in December with each community cutting every 2 or 3 years.  Three of the five communities we are working with were due to cut in December 2014 and we had already heard accounts of girls being cut and of others successfully avoiding it.

The approach that we are taking involves engaging everyone in the community in discussions about a range of issues relating to the rights of women and girls including education, employment and FGC.  Local women and men have been trained as Paralegals to talk at community events and to provide advice to parents and girls. Workshops are held for teachers, health workers, parents and so many other groups.  Eventually, communities are encouraged to choose for themselves to abandon the practice of FGC and to declare this publicly.   This approach has been shown to be more successful in bringing about lasting change than where the main emphasis has been on enforcing the law.

Inevitably, when listening to community members there have been highs and lows.  In a community called Taranganya the police and local authority tried to take a firm stance, threatening to arrest anyone involved in cutting which resulted in conflict and some fighting between the authorities and local people.  The police felt overwhelmed and had little choice but to withdraw.  Many families went ahead and cut their girls, celebrating publicly afterwards with dancing, singing and feasting.

But we have also met families who have taken a brave stance against the cut and have resisted the pressure to cut their girls. One such young girl, Gati, from Kegonga, who is just 15, now starts secondary school next week, hoping to become a journalist in the future.  Had she been cut in December her life would have been radically different.  She would not have gone to secondary school but would almost certainly have been married off in the next few months and probably pregnant shortly after this.

As my visit goes on we meet more and more people who would like to join the movement to abandon the cut in Kuria and plan a programme of events throughout 2015 with ECAW and the local communities to encourage more and more families to say not the cuts in December 2015 and beyond.”

This blog originally appeared on Feed the Minds’ website – thanks for cross-posting.

You can read more from Kuria here.