FGM in The Gambia: ending abusive traditions

When I founded Safe Hands for Girls in 2013, an organization working to end FGM and child marriage, I felt it was important that women like me, who have the lived experience of going through these practices, become the change agents who lead the fight. 

I was born in The Gambia, one of the countries with the highest FGM rates. Almost three-quarters of Gambian women between 15 and 49 have undergone FGM. For me, it happened when I was one week old.. 

Today, Safe Hands for Girls has about 20 people working in The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the United States, supported by many volunteers. We combine grassroots work and high-level advocacy. 

In The Gambia, we offer educational activities, including school clubs, mentorship programs, and training for survivors and law enforcement officials. We work with religious leaders, so they can be champions of change. We organize seminars and conferences where we raise the profile of the issue using survivor voices. We also go into communities to have dialogues with midwives and circumcisers. 

In some communities it is easy to talk about the harmful effects of FGM. But others believe that FGM is their cultural right, or a religious right – and because of that we face backlash. 

Respect and understanding

It has always been respect and understanding, and a lot of compassion for the people who believe in this practice, that opened the way to these conversations. It’s important to understand that FGM has been practiced for centuries. People hold very strong beliefs, and to change them, we have to listen. Whenever we go into a community, we do not try to impose our views. We are there to listen and understand, then come up with targeted programs, as what may work in one community will not necessarily work in another. 

Safe Hands for Girls was also a key player in influencing the passing of the legislation to ban FGM in The Gambia. 

In 2014, we collaborated with other organizations, especially youth groups, to achieve this result. The work involved young people, survivors, the media, and advocacy with the President and Cabinet members. All this led the President to pronounce a ban on FGM in 2015. It happened because the conversation was led by women of The Gambia who had been subjected to FGM and were sharing their suffering, asking for this to end.

Now, looking at the results, there has been a slight change overall. The Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, which looks at FGM rates in women aged 15 to 49, shows a slight fall between 2010 and 2018 (from 76.3% to 75.7%). Although it will take a few years for these statistics to reflect the impact of the 2015 ban, the number of girls under the age of 14 who undergo FGM is now going down. Newborn girls are the ones who are benefiting from the law.

But this is not enough. This year, an attempt to overturn the FGM ban was only narrowly averted. The debate started because communities said they did not want to see their parents and grandparents arrested, and religious leaders backed them. In July, the National Assembly voted to maintain the law – yet the challenge to the ban shows how easily progress can be reversed. Many of us believe that FGM is wrong and should end, but our societies are averse to confrontation.

In the end, the law stayed in place because of the work of civil society. In particular, it was survivors sharing their stories with decision-makers that made the difference.

Changing minds

I remember when Safe Hands for Girls started, we were kicked out by one of the communities where we work. They did not want to hear anything we had to say. So we set up a community garden, and more than 600 women took part in the initiative. Today, those women are our biggest champions. In the recent conversations about repealing the law, they said they not only had their vegetables to grow and sell as an alternative income, they were also able to send their daughters to school for longer than they used to. 

When the law was passed in 2015, and when it was kept in place in 2024, decision-makers understood that this was not a Western agenda. It was important for us to show that we are doing this work because, as women who have been through the practice, we do not want to pass it down to our children.

In this context, the approach of the global movement against FGM and the way to talk about communities has not been helpful. Calling a community barbaric for practicing FGM leads its members to focus on the disrespect instead of hearing the message.

For Safe Hands for Girls, it is not only about ending FGM. It is ensuring that we lift women out of poverty, that girls stay in school, and that marriage is delayed. We look at the issues affecting women and girls in a holistic way. Ending FGM is not only stopping a harmful practice – it is changing minds on how women and girls are viewed as a whole.

Everything is interconnected

Currently, we focus on providing alternative livelihoods to women or circumcisers who believe in the practice of FGM and are looking for alternative forms of subsistence. We do that through regenerative agriculture. 

Even though the primary focus of our organization is the fulfilment of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child by ending FGM and child marriage, we also deal with the climate crisis, food security, poverty alleviation, and ending hunger. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are all interconnected.

This work requires investing heavily in communities, looking at women’s agency, lifting women out of poverty, and ensuring they are part of decision-making to uphold their rights. 

Other abusive traditions must end too. A child cannot consent to sex, so forcing a girl into a marriage means giving someone the right to rape her. People have accepted these traditions as norms, which link different types of abuses. A girl that is subjected to FGM is likely also to become a child bride, so we need to look at these issues together.

The other element that is lacking is support to the victims of these abuses. This includes both psychological support for survivors and access to medical services to reverse the FGM. These surgeries are expensive and for many remain unavailable. Training medical professionals and law enforcement officers on how to deal with such issues in a sensitive manner is also essential. It is a huge unfilled gap. 

In The Gambia, laws against FGM and child marriage do not stop people from practicing what they believe. This is where education in communities plays a key role. The issue we face, however, is lack of sufficient funding. Social and behavioral change takes time and consistency in education and programs. But the available resources are not enough to provide the solutions we need.

Six years from the target date of 2030 to end FGM globally, we are not even close to reaching the goal. If anything, the numbers are going up. When the SDGs were adopted, around 200 million girls and women in the world had undergone FGM. That figure recently reached 230 million. All of us should be outraged by this. 

We must also consider the issue from a broader perspective. The Gambia may have averted the repeal of the FGM law, but when it comes to women’s reproductive rights, we see rollbacks across the world – in Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Latin America to name just a few countries and regions. The anti-reproductive rights movement is working hard, which means that our response must be stronger. We need to be more vigilant. There is an urgency in what is happening to women across the world. We need to come together to re-evaluate our approach and how we respond globally. 

Jaha was interviewed by Claudia Delpero