Fighting Female Genital Mutilation: Chefu Sirri Foundation embarks on campaign to sensitise pupils, students.

The robust sensitisation campaign is a series of activities embarked on by officials of the foundation ahead of the commemoration of the 2023 International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

Worth noting is the fact that in 2012, the United Nations General Assembly designated February 6 as the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.

The day aims to amplify and direct the efforts on the elimination of the practice. This year’s edition will be on the theme: “Partnership with men and boys to transform social and gender norms to end female genital mutilation”.

In a bid to school pupils and students on the dangers of the practice, officials of the foundation visited nursery, primary and secondary sections of the Harvard School Complex and ASEC Foundation in Yaounde.

They used the opportunity to have educative talks with the pupils and students. As revealed by the Founder of Chefu Sirri Foundation, Barrister Chefu Sirri-Afanwi Joy, the team also intends to visit and sensitise students of Delight Bilingual School Complex at Leboudi at the outskirts of Yaounde.

“We decided to carry out these series of activities to commemorate the day and to actually be able to reach out to our communities on information not just on Female Genital Mutilation but on Gender Base Violence as a whole,” Barrister Chefu explained.

The rights advocate noted that female genital mutilation is one of the biggest forms of violence that is being perpetrated on the girl child.

“…we want our communities to be able to know about this vice and to be able to help survivors to be able to live in the community,” she said, noting that much still needs to be dome towards achieving zero per cent of the vice.

The legal mind said the sensitisation campaign was also an opportunity to educate the pupils and students on how to integrate those who are already victims of the vice into the society to stop the victims from seeing “themselves as if they are not normal humans”.   

“We don’t want anybody to be a victim anymore…effects of the practice are many. Some of the survivors have problems of child birth, suffer trauma…we are trying to create safe spaces for victims,” she added, while appealing to all and sundry to stop stigmatizing victims.

Chefu said the campaign of the foundation is limited to girls but also targets boys. “We go down to communities and schools especially and we talk to both boys and girls…we want boys to stop shaming girls for things that happened to them against their wish,” she explained, while reiterating the need for synergy of actions to stamp out the vice.

Aside sensitisation campaigns on school campuses, officials of the foundation, it should be said, have also carried out sensitisation on the media to get the messages across.

About Female Genital Mutilation

According to the UN, female genital mutilation comprises all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons and is recognised internationally as a violation of the human rights, the health and the integrity of girls and women.

Girls who undergo female genital mutilation face short-term complications such as severe pain, shock, excessive bleeding, infections, and difficulty in passing urine, as well as long-term consequences for their sexual and reproductive and mental health.

Although primarily concentrated in 30 countries in Africa and the Middle East, the vice is a universal problem and is also practiced in some countries in Asia and Latin America.

The UN strives for its full eradication by 2030, following the spirit of Sustainable Development Goal 5. Since 2008, UNFPA, jointly with UNICEF, leads the largest global programme to accelerate the elimination of female genital mutilation.

The Joint Programme currently focuses on 17 countries in Africa and the Middle East and also supports regional and global initiatives. Over the years, this partnership has seen significant achievements.

Through the support of the joint programme, more than 6 million girls and women received prevention, protection and care services related to FGM. Some 45 million people made public declarations to abandon FGM. 532,158 girls were prevented from undergoing FGM