By Mahnaz M Harrison | Project leader
According to UNICEF 5 East African countries – Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, and Uganda – account for almost one quarter of global incidences of female genital mutilation (FGM). This translates into nearly 50 million girls and young women from this region having undergone FGM[1]. With your support and help we have made progress in eradicating FGM in two regions of Kenya and are poised to extend our efforts to 4 more countries over the next four years. But this can only occur with your continued help and support.
Our model has proven to be highly efficacious for eliminating FGM in Kenya and we can scale our efforts to elsewhere in Africa. We are currently registering and enrolling 2,000 girls in our program for this school year. This would bring our total enrolled girls closer to 5,000 along with hundreds of boys that are sensitized through our programming and voicing their outrage against FGM. Among those we enroll, we have an over 90% success rate in saving them from FGM. In this video you could see and hear the voices and aspirations and be proud of them as we are.
As we enroll girls from various new schools, we help communities face down FGM by focusing on the girls’ rights to health and safety and addressing the importance of attending school and becoming fully productive members of their communities. We engage boys since as men they become the “keepers of traditions” and can potentially become advocates of eradicating a harmful traditional practice that has already ruined the lives of millions of women and girls.
We have had some landmark successes this summer. LM4D’s brand had us invited to partake in the First Ladies Counties’ weeklong anti-FGM camp for girls in Migori, Kenya that was designed to “train-the-trainers” who are out there fighting the scourge of FGM on a day-to-day basis. Also, school holidays are a particularly vulnerable time for the girls to be cut. Because of this we kept a watchful eye on the girls that were at risk of undergoing FGM in August during the school break. Because of our successes, this year we didn’t have to remove girls from their communities and house and feed them in rescue centers, unlike last year. Our success in this came as a result of numerous community meetings by our tireless field workers, and the fact that we invited the authorities to join us and amplify our voice with their presence and supportive comments.
It is only with your support that girls can continue to celebrate their liberation from FGM. On behalf of the girls dreaming of a better and healthier life, we ask you to continue supporting our efforts. Some of you have opted to be recurring donors, which brings us matching dollars from GlobalGiving. A million thanks from me, our team, and of course the girls, for supporting us.
Please follow us on Instagram @Lastmile4d and Twitter @LastMile_4dand. Also, visit our website at www.lastmile4d.org to learn about our work and make contribution to us, directly during the year.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can recieve an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
