UK Aid does not save girls from FGM

Recently, Nimco Ali wrote a controversial and important piece entitled ‘Never in my fight against FGM have I seen a penny of UK aid money save one girl.’

That this comes from a high profile anti-FGM activist, a former employee at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and an AID supporter is noteworthy. To date, surprisingly, it has neither generated a response nor a defence of Aid.

It’s good to see the scales fall from her eyes in regard to Aid and the work promoted as contributing towards ‘ending FGM world-wide by 2030’. She wrote the piece after an UK International Development equality impact assessment was made public, and ministers said that planned Aid cuts would impact millions of women and girls in Africa, saying: 

‘I am here to tell you that is not true. I am on the frontline of the work the Foreign Office says it funds and I can tell you UK aid funding to “help end female genital mutilation” (FGM) has no evidence that a penny given has actually saved a girl from FGM.’

Until she engaged with the international development world she, like many, believed that UK Aid was saving lives and making the world a better place. Now she says ‘Our aid has never reached those they use on the cover of their reports and it’s time to be honest.’

The equality impact assessment showed Aid to be discriminatory and disorganised. Money is not given to the front line because people there ‘apparently can’t be trusted to get the money directly themselves so we create ridiculous consultant-led consortiums where local organisations are marginalised.’ It was instead ‘mostly spent in London on salaries and bonuses for the consultant organisations DFID sub-contracted.’

Who is the FCDO funding?

In 2022 it reported that a major recipient was the Africa-led Movement to End FGM. It agreedthen up to £35 million over five years for a second phase of support.

Components would be delivered by a six-member consortium led by Options. Included are Amref Health Africa, ActionAid, Orchid Project, Africa Coordination Centre for Abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting and University of Portsmouth. The programme is scheduled to run for three years until September 2025.

Targeted interventions are expected to e.g change attitudes and practices by working directly with communities; use media and communication campaigns to support positive norms change and advocacy to encourage leaders to prioritise ending FGM; support grassroots activists and youth initiatives with small grants to lead change within their communities and hold governments to account; and integrating efforts to end FGM into existing development programmes, taking advantage of their existing structures to reinforce ending FGM efforts at scale.  

To demonstrate how Aid can be delivered more effectively, Ali has established the Five Foundation ‘which works at the systemic level to advocate for better funding streams to women on the African continent and beyond.’ Her Foundation launched a fund for grassroots activists ‘using the latest evidence of what works to end FGM’.

Her critical views on what she terms a ‘feminist’ foreign policy can be accessed in this opinion piece: Feminist foreign policy activism can harm African women where she writes: “In the United Kingdom, The Five Foundation has pushed for systemic change for years, including a significant contribution to the new international strategy on women and girls. It has regularly brought senior decision-makers together with donors, the media, and business leaders, to make the case for investment in front-line women on the African continent. This shifting of the power to the local level would be real feminist foreign policy in action and could mean the U.K. would find its place again as a partner for global peace and prosperity.”

The Foundation’s work focused initially on three regions of Kenya, and has plans to extend to Somaliland and Djibouti. It suggests “The impact real and direct funding – rather than promised funding – has to those at the grassroots is eye-opening indeed.” It’s good to see her put money where her mouth is.

Meanwhile, I hope the Foundation takes a moment to correct the website’s inaccurate description of Clitoridectomy. No matter how severe the practice, the clitoris is never totally removed. This video of the vulva usefully explains its anatomy.

Ali could also review her contribution to the UK’s ‘patronising and draconian response‘ to FGM which risks victimising women who have already been abused. And to admit that activists like her were instrumental in promoting the need for the type of FGM-safeguarding experienced by some as stigmatising, exploitative and unjustified, and as an assault on belonging and citizenship.

And, importantly, to publicly acknowledge that adult genital piercings continue to be the only type of FGM reported in England.

 

 

Why we should be concerned about UK female genital mutilation laws and associated monitoring and reporting systems

This Open Access paper was published online, January 2022. It was one of a number of replies to ‘The prosecution of Dawoodi Bohra women’ by Richard Shweder.

In the abstract, Shweder wrote: Muslim women of the Dawoodi Bohra community have recently been prosecuted because they customarily adhere to a religiously based gender-inclusive version of the Jewish Abrahamic circumcision tradition. In Dawoodi Bohra families it is not only boys but also girls who are circumcised. And it is mothers who typically control and arrange for the circumcision of their daughters. By most accounts the circumcision procedure for girls amounts to a nick, abrasion, piercing or small cut restricted to the female foreskin or prepuce (often referred to as ‘the clitoral hood’ or in some parts of Southeast Asia as the ‘clitoral veil’). From a strictly surgical point of view the custom is less invasive than a typical male circumcision as routinely and legally performed by Jews and Muslims. The question arises: if the practice is legal for the gander why should it be banned for the goose?

My contribution

In the paper I suggested that UK female genital mutilation laws discriminate against specific women and infantilise them. FGM types accord with those of the politically partisan World Health Organisation, but new instances reported are genital piercings. Most female genital mutilation seen in the National Health Service is less severe than male circumcision, which is not illegal. Nor should it be. The laws, monitoring and reporting systems need reviewing with a view to decriminalising female genital mutilation.

The paper can be accessed here.

April 2022

A Special Issue of Global Discourse: Gender Equality in Abrahamic Circumcision: Why or Why Not? containing mine, and a number of other replies, has been published by Bristol University Press and is accessible here.

Questioning the anti-FGM movement

Mamasa Camara talks about her research and activism for women's health in the Gambia

Making cultural practices the focus of health and development initiatives overlooks the social, economic and political issues that put women’s bodies at risk. The idea that notion perpetuates is that women do not know the cause of their own suffering and that interventions have to be imposed externally.

Mamasa Camara

In 2012, in her first year at university Mamasa Camara set up a women’s health conference in the Gambia to create a space for women to talk about the issues that mattered to them and to hear their views on female genital cutting. 

Since then she has seen how the global campaign against female genital cutting has become big business, attracting a lot of money, at a time when there is a desperate need for funding for general health infrastructure as well as impacting African women’s rights in the west. Mamasa feels the campaign is now doing more harm than good and her PhD in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies, which she is just finishing, has investigated that process of change. 

It came about after over a decade of activism on the issue of female genital cutting and it uses the practice as a way of understanding international development, women’s rights activism and western interventions and policies and practices that purport to make women’s lives or health better but may in fact cause more harm. 

Mamasa [2016] uses the term female genital cutting (FGC) as she says female genital mutilation (FGM) is highly politicised. Her interest is in hearing from women in West Africa about their views of the impact of global interventions and the social, economic and political ramifications of these.

Campaigning on women’s health

Mamasa grew up between the Gambia and the US. Her father was a traditional healer, a role that was passed down through the family and meant that he was viewed as a community leader in the US. Her mother died when she was very little and Mamasa grew up with a strong interest in women’s health.

She has been working on female genital cutting since setting up the first youth-led national health conference on the issue in 2012 and then going on to set up a women’s health initiative in the Gambia to understand women’s health concerns. 

“The conference became my point of departure,” she says.  It came about after she started questioning the campaign about female genital cutting. She states: “No-one spoke about it in my community and I wondered why, why is the narrative about female cutting being both produced and consumed in the West and how can African women be centred in their own experiences.” She researched how female genital cutting is practised in different places and what it means to those who practise it and wrote her plan for the conference while in the US, getting the endorsement of the Vice President of The Gambia in the process.

Mamasa says the conference, which has been held annually until Covid, left her shocked at the gap between western developmental perspectives on female cutting and African women’s actual health concerns, such as lack of access to healthcare, standards in maternity and reproductive care and the health impact of climate change. She states: “I began to understand the workings of the anti-FGM campaign, and international development more broadly, how it frames women’s problems and prescribes solutions that are often out of touch with their everyday realities. These campaigns and actions can potentially cause more harm than good because they lack a genuine commitment to actively listen to and prioritise the voices of people directly affected, thereby undermining the ability to create meaningful change based on their perspectives and experiences.” 

Colonialism

After the 2012 conference Mamasa returned to the US where she says she was approached by western media and agencies looking for the ‘face’ of the FGM campaign because her university, Spelman College, had done a profile of her work. “I was not able to articulate at the time why the way they wanted to position me made me feel uncomfortable, or why there seemed to be parallels between that and the colonial portrayal of Africans as people who don’t know how to think about their own traditions, and who live in barbaric societies,” says Mamasa. “It was very seductive, though. A kind of call to power.”

She said no and a relative was cast instead. “I would have been a victim of a campaign that may be well intentioned but is greatly misinformed, one that usurps and channels people’s power in a particular direction,” she says. “I got the sense that participating in their campaigns would compromise my sense of truth, and that of my own experience.” 

Postgraduate studies

Mamasa decided she needed more time and space to think about the issues raised by her experiences as an activist and the role of western intervention in women’s health and applied to Cambridge to do first an MPhil and then a PhD. She is also interested in how she can create a type of activism that is accountable to the communities it serves. One area of focus is how the western approach to female cutting has been internalised by young African people despite it having little to do with health priorities on the ground. 

During her fieldwork in the Gambia she noted that young people were adopting the terminology used by the World Health Organization to address female genital cutting, despite it not being the primary cause of women’s hardships. “Young people spoke as if they were reading from a script, like they had memorised the global ideas about female genital cutting, especially prioritising the term mutilation, even though there is no evidence that that type of genital cutting exists in the country,” she says, adding: “If we just change the faces of those involved in colonial practices and do not change the practices themselves, we are in danger of reproducing those very same dynamics.”

She says there is a link between youth activism against female genital cutting and the funding available for such campaigns. She adds that the campaigns can end up criminalising innocent people and profiling whole communities as well as making African governments prioritise laws against female genital cutting and funding for campaigns on this rather than funding the kind of social welfare programmes that would have a much bigger impact on women.

Speaking out

In 2018 Mamasa attended a Hidden Voices roundtable in London which included a range of health workers and others. She found increasing concerns that FGM policies are being used to reduce women’s rights, with, she says, claims that women from certain countries are being surveilled, interrogated and victimised by the NHS system, immigration and social services and potentially having their children taken away from them while communities are being divided against each other.  “Some of the architects of the movement against FGM were saying it had gone too far and had had unintended consequences,” says Mamasa.

She was invited to be part of a group of scholars that have studied female genital cutting from very different backgrounds. “We have come together to discuss the deep harms and violence that the global anti-FGM campaign has caused to African women,” she says. The aim is to push back against the foregrounding of certain cultural practices in health, development and intellectual work and to focus instead on the need for support and partnership to address the concerns of women on the ground.

Mamasa is aware that speaking out is risky. “My approach is distinct in that it undercuts the usual discourse and perspectives of western activists and as a consequence, I have been cornered, victimised and sometimes silenced,” she says. “We are in such a hostile environment. I have been told to be careful because the anti-FGM movement is so strong and powerful. It’s difficult to find the space to have a healthy debate about this.” 

Even in academia, she says, questioning the anti-FGM campaign is “a dangerous position to hold”, with some leaving the academy in order to speak up about it. The group wants to create an alternative space where accurate knowledge can be shared and where alternative ways of understanding culture and tradition can be created. “Activism doesn’t necessarily mean doing away with tradition,” says Mamasa. 

She sees the group’s purpose as being about holding leaders to account. She is also continuing her work with the women’s health initiative in the Gambia and looking to expand that into an organisation based around development and healthcare which involves women on the ground and which aims to channel resources into communities so they can use them to address the health issues that are a priority for them.

She says: “Making cultural practices the focus of health and development initiatives overlooks the social, economic and political issues that put women’s bodies at risk. The idea that that notion perpetuates is that women do not know the cause of their own suffering and that interventions have to be imposed externally.” 

This was first published 20 June 2023 by Gates Cambridge. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

An 2016 piece by Mamasa Camara, Female Circumcision through an African Lens can be accessed here.

Zero Tolerance of Zero Tolerance for FGM

Sheffield hosted an important but different event on 5th February 2023,the 11th anniversary of the UN General Assembly’s designated International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. But rather than rehearsing the usual arguments, this event questioned the premise of the zero tolerance approach.