When a chief in Baringo county wanted to address a baraza, the locals would have none of it. “Your wife is not circumcised,” they told him.
Mogotio resident Irene Kiprotich says this open humiliation sums up the stakes in the war on Female Genital Mutilation in rural areas. To be on the safe side, many men will not marry uncircumcised women, and force their daughters to undergo the cut.
Any man who defies the culture is viewed as an enemy of the community. Those who don’t allow their daughters to undergo the cut are nick-named ‘half-men’.
While FGM is normally looked at as a woman-only affair, an NGO in Baringo is breaking that myth and involving men and boys to help eradicate the custom.
Based in the hot spots of female circumcision, Dandelion Africa focuses on changing the way men look at the problem. Started in 2014, the NGO has engaged 2,890 boys and men from rural schools in Mogotio and neighbouring villages under the ‘Boys for Change Programme’.
DEALING WITH PATRIARCHY
Wendo Aszed, founder and CEO of Dandelion Africa, said the paradigm shift is informed by realities on the ground, where men are usually the decision makers. She said direct involvement of men in the fight has helped individual families drop the practice, making it more unpopular.
“Boys talking to other boys on effects of FGM has had a great impact in four villages in the area, where we no longer hear about the practice,” Wendo said.
While she appreciates the cooperation, Wendo said sometimes the custom finds its way back to some places they thought they had eradicated it. This can be “heartbreaking” but they have to keep going back to check.
“We need to discard age-old beliefs that an uncircumcised woman cannot cook for her circumcised son,” she said.
Some of the Baringo residents we spoke to said FGM is no longer rampant among the young women, but the greatest challenge now is where leaders and civil servants, especially chiefs, encourage their wives and girls to go for FGM.
Ken Mundany, a class eight pupil from Mogotio and a beneficiary of the programme, said it has made them become protectors of girls against the custom.
“We have also learned how to keep off drugs and crime,” he said.
Dandelion has also been conducting a campaign to remind the society not to lean so much on girls’ rights and forget the boy child. “Men and boys play a big role in the society and they should be educated,” Mundany said.
Anti-FGM campaigners say the custom is becoming less common, as several NGOs have tried to persuade those who practise it to abandon the culture.
MARRIED WOMEN TARGETED
The NGO also has plans targeting the girl child. Under the Girls-For-Leaders programme, Dandelion has engaged 3,600 girls from 38 schools in the area.
While FGM has gone down, there still needs to be more work done, especially on the lower side of Baringo and Rongai, Wendy said.
“Currently, our focus with the FGM campaign is specifically in Mogotio subcounty and Rongai, as they are hot spots. Our approach is prevention, dissemination of information and capacity building gatekeepers so they can implement what the law says as far as FGM is concerned,” she said.
Beneficiaries say their spouses were the greatest impediment to fighting the custom. But the war is far from being won as tactics change.
Dandelion administrator Harun Karanja said the custom has decreased among girls but has shifted to married women.
“As much as we do not have statistics due to the stigmatisation because people are usually not willing to talk about the custom, the cases amongst married women have increased,” he said.
Mary Rotich, a mother of four and a teacher in Rongai, said the programme has helped build confidence and leadership skills, adding that beneficiaries can easily be singled out from their peers due to their high levels of discipline.
“Cases of school absenteeism have reduced, as fewer girls are getting married off to old men. Many girls who used to remain out of school during their menses now enjoy access to sanitary pads,” she said.
CONVERTING THE CUTTERS
Mary Ngetich, a reformed circumciser who had been taking girls through the torturous experience for 20 years, said she does not regret it since it earned her a living. The mother of eight underwent a training that made her stop the practice two years ago and is now an anti-FGM campaigner.
“It used to be my main source of income. I could be called to as far as Mukutani to circumcise girls,” she said.
Mary, 55, said she is happy she is no longer doing illegal practices and has even gained new knowledge on how to earn money without engaging in the custom.
Wendy said she founded the NGO because she believed women and girls have a powerful voice that they can use to fulfill their potential.
“The organisation is locally led and rooted in a rural area and has knowledge of rural cultures and social norms and problems that are facing marginalised communities,” she said.
“Our gender-transformation approach creates safe spaces for women and men to acknowledge and address the intersectionality of other systems of discrimination ad human right abuses, gender inequalities and accountability.”
The CEO urged the authorities to work more on law implementation since FGM is illegal.
“Perpetrators of the custom are not brought to book. Policy makers should come out and openly speak about against FGM,” she said.