Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting - The Globe and Mail - 0 views
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Efua Dorkenoo fought against female genital cutting
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Dorkenoo started organizations to battle genital cutting and co-ordinated the effort more broadly as acting director of women’s health at the World Health Organization in the late 1990s.
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“She inspired a generation of feminists across the world to take up the cause of banning the procedure,
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Last year, the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to recognize female genital cutting as a human-rights violation.
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African-led organization she helped found, The Girl Generation: Together to End FGM, began work this month.
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teenage girls were less likely to have been cut than older women in half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated.
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In Egypt, where more women have been cut than in any other country, surveys showed that 81 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 per cent of women in their late 40s.
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Female genital cutting involves pricking, piercing or amputating some or all of the external genitalia
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The World Health Organization says female genital cutting has no health benefits and can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and, later in life, cysts, infections and infertility.
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125 million women living today in the countries where it is concentrated have experienced such cutting.
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The mother was so badly scarred, she said, that she could not deliver her baby through natural childbirth.
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Foundation for Women’s Health and Development to promote the health of African women and girls, with a focus on abolishing female genital cutting
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co-ordinated national action plans against female genital cutting in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan.
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In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II named Ms. Dorkenoo an honorary officer in the Order of the British Empire.