Roughly 30 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) in the last eight years — a 15 per cent increase in the total number of survivors since 2016, proving that the efforts to eradicate the violent practice is too slow as population growth speeds up.
According to a report released by UNICEF on International Women’s Day last week, most of these women and girls live in Africa. By UNICEF calculations, over 144 million women and girls in Africa have been through the procedure, where females ranging from infancy to adolescence have their external genitalia partially or fully removed.
The custom is imposed on women as a form of violent sexual control, and can lead to long term health complications, including menstrual pain, decreased sexual satisfaction, urinary tract infections and post-traumatic stress disorder. It can also lead to death — a recent study published in Nature Scientific Reports estimated that over 44,000 girls and young women die each year in Africa from complications of FGM.
UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell said there’s been a concerning rise in younger girls being subject to the procedure.
“We’re seeing a worrying trend that more girls are subjected to the practice at younger ages, many before their fifth birthday,” she said. “That further reduces the window to intervene.”
“Female genital mutilation harms girls’ bodies, dims their futures, and endangers their lives. We need to strengthen the efforts of ending this harmful practice.”
In Somalia, a staggering 99 per cent of the female population between the ages of 15 and 49 have been forced to undergo the procedure. More than three quarter of girls aged 0-14 in the country have undergone FGM.
According the report, 4 in 10 FGM survivors live in fragile and conflict-affected countries in Africa, such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Sudan, where rapid population growth is putting a strain on education and health services that work to help improve awareness around the harmful impact of the procedure.
In some countries, the number of FGM cases are declining. They include Kenya, which has categorised the prevalence of the procedure from moderate to low prevalence; Sierra Leone, which has dropped from high to moderately high prevalence and Burkina Faso, where the proportion of circumcised women aged 15-49 fell from 80 per cent to 30 per cent in the last thirty years.
“In some countries, progress would need to be 10 times faster than the best progress observed in history in order to reach the target by 2030,” the report explained.
Nimco Ali, CEO of the Five Foundation, a UK-based charity that works to eliminate female genital mutilation, said the latest UNICEF figures are “shocking” and “devastating,” and that more funding is needed to end the practice.
“We simply cannot end FGM unless large donors begin to trust and fund African women,” Ali said in a recent press release.
“We need to speed up efforts tenfold if we are to save the 70 million girls at risk over the next eight years. This means not only drastically increasing the amount of funding available as core support to African frontline women’s groups, but also making sure that decisions on what interventions to fund are made locally.”
“My hope is that The Five Fund can play an important role in making sure that this happens and spark immediate changes in the response of other donors to this urgent and underfunded issue.”
In 2020, Ali’s organisation helped Sudan’s government outlaw the practice of FGM. Many people however warned the law alone would not be enough to end the practice, due to its historic connections to cultural and religious beliefs.
“This is not just about legal reforms,” one spokesperson for UNICEF told the press in 2020. “There’s a lot of work to be done to ensure that society will accept this.”