Give top priority to war against the female ‘cut’

As President William Ruto maps out his government’s priorities, he should prioritise the campaign to end female genital cutting.

Whereas the 21 per cent prevalence is an improvement, thousands of women and girls still undergo this painful act. 

Besides the permanent effects of emotional and physical scarring and life-long harmful effects such as fistula and loss of life during the cutting or complications like death during childbirth, it’s also a gateway to child marriage; once cut, a girl is considered a woman. That causes school dropout as well.

Female genital cutting is recognised the world over as torture and a gross violation of human rights.

But in some 22 counties of Kenya, the practice goes on almost unabated despite the existence of the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act.

When key duty bearers and stakeholders view it as a harmless cultural rite practised by a few, they fail to understand the gravity of this offence not only due to the harm it visits on women and girls but also for its patriarchal ideological underpinnings that view women, not as equal human beings but those who should be ‘controlled and tamed’ through the partial or total removal of genitalia.

Shockingly, there’s now a rise in the medicalisation of the female cut with medics getting involved in the place of traditional cutters!

Cases of the practice are also being recorded among communities that had abandoned it while the cross-border ‘cut’ is on the rise.

These trends are worrying as they jeopardise the well-being of millions of girls and women and threaten the goal of eliminating the practice.

Presidential declaration

Despite these sad developments, at the International Conference on Population and Development held in Nairobi in November 2019—the Nairobi Summit, or ICPD+25—Kenya through a presidential declaration committed to ending the practice by this year.

That would be done by strengthening coordination in the areas of legislation and policy framework, communication and advocacy, evidence generation and cross-border collaboration.

Kenya further committed to eliminating all forms of gender-based violence (GBV), including FGM and child and forced marriages, by 2030.

This would be done by addressing social and cultural norms that propagate the practice while providing support to women and girls who have been affected.

Kenya made 12 other commitments at the global Generation Equality Forum that it hosted in June last year, key among them a promise to fully implement GBV laws and policies.

It would adopt a GBV indicator in the government performance contracting framework by this year to track duty-bearers’ roles in enforcing and implementing them. 

It also pledged to invest $23 million (Sh2.7 billion) for GBV prevention and response by this year and increase the resource allocation up to $50 million (Sh6 billion) by 2026 through a co-financing model.

Improved coordination in the implementation of laws and increased financial resources towards the national anti-FGM campaign are all that is needed.

Ms Parit is the executive director, Hope Beyond Foundation. [email protected]. @HopeBeyondKenya