Answering your questions about female genital mutilation
Female genital mutilation (FGM) is the harmful practice of cutting female genitals. Every year on February 6, International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation brings awareness to the harmful practice.
Plan International works with youth and creates spaces for young people, especially girls, to raise their voices against the harmful practice of FGM. We help girls involve their communities and governments in defending and upholding their rights.
What is FGM?
FGM includes procedures that can intentionally change or wound female genital organs for non-medical reasons, according to the World Health Organization. FGM is an extremely painful process, and too often, it affects the health and lives of millions of girls worldwide.
FGM is a form of gender-based violence and a violation of women’s and girls’ human rights. Still, FGM is widely accepted and practised around the world.
Whom does FGM affect?
More than 230 million girls and women alive today have been through FGM. The average age for girls to undergo FGM is between 5 and 9 years old. Sometimes an infant will go through FGM days after they’re born.
An FGM survivor, 19-year-old Barwaaqe, tells us that like many other girls, she was left traumatized by her experience. “I will never forget that moment, and it always comes into your mind. It also caused the irregular periods that I always get. It was terrible and I can’t forget that day.”
Why is FGM still allowed?
FGM happens for a number of reasons – generally associated with tradition, religion and culture as well as deep-seated inequality between girls and boys and men and women. In some communities, FGM is considered an essential part of a girl’s upbringing. It is considered a rite of passage, performed when a girl enters adulthood, before she is married. When some parents struggle financially, they need the dowry from their daughter’s marriage to secure their future. Climate crises are exacerbating the pressures families face to marry their daughters, with drought and a lack of livestock and food sources leading to an increase in child, early and forced marriage and FGM.
What are the risks of FGM?
There is no benefit to female genital mutilation. FGM increases immediate and long-term psychological, obstetric, genitourinary, sexual and reproductive health complications.
Women who have undergone FGM are twice as likely to die during childbirth and are more likely to give birth to a stillborn baby than those who haven’t. They also experience painful intercourse, menstrual blockage, urinary blockage and infection, wound infection, septicaemia and even death. This is because FGM is commonly performed by community elders, relatives and practitioners of traditional medicine in unsanitary environments using old knives, razor blades, scissors or broken glass and without anesthetic.
content warning:
the following video contains descriptions of a FGM ceremony by a woman who underwent FGM
Hawa*, a young woman from Mali, underwent female genital mutilation when she was just four years old. Under false pretences, Hawa's grandmother and aunt took her to a clinic in a rural area of Mali where she was cut by an elderly woman. To this day, she remembers the pain. “The pain was always there; when I went to the toilet, the pain was there, and I was scared. I had lots of infections and the wound didn’t scar very well. At the time, I thought it was a normal thing. I told myself, if my grandmother took me there, it was normal.”
*Name has been changed
Where is FGM practised?
FGM is practised globally. It’s common in the western, eastern and northeastern countries of Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East.
| Burkina Faso | 76% |
| Djibouti | 93% |
| Egypt | 91% |
| Eritrea | 89% |
| Ethiopia | 74% |
| Gambia | 75% |
| Guinea | 97% |
| Guinea-Bissau | 45% |
| Kenya | 21% |
| Mali | 91% |
| Mauritania | 69% |
| Nigeria | 25% |
| Senegal | 26% |
| Somalia | 98% |
| Sudan | 88% |
| Uganda | 1% |
| Yemen | 19% |
What is Plan International doing about FGM?
Plan International works with children and young people, with parents, community leaders and government authorities to raise awareness, challenge lawmakers, help transform behaviour and put an end to harmful traditional practices that violate girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights, including FGM. A key aspect of our work centres on promoting gender equality, as many harmful traditional practices like FGM are often rooted in gender inequality.
Watch this quick overview of groups working to end FGM in Kenya, where the practice has been in steady decline since 1998.
Learn more about Plan International’s work against FGM and gender-based violence:
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