This
report documents activities of the Joint Programme in its fifth year of implementation
in 15 African countries: Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, The
Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Somalia,Sudan
and Uganda.
The report documents achievements in
evidence-based strategies identified including:
- Effective enactment, enforcement and use of national policy and
legal instruments to promote the abandonment of FGM/C
- Local-level commitment to FGM/C abandonment
- Media campaigns and other forms of communication dissemination
organized and implemented to support and publicize FGM/C abandonment
- Partnerships with religious groups and other organizations and
institutions
- Expansion of reproductive health policies, planning and programming
to include FGM/C
- Use of new and existing data for implementation and monitoring of
evidence-based programming and policies
- Tracking of programme benchmarks and achievements to maximize
accountability of programme partners
- Strengthened regional dynamics for the abandonment of FGM/C
- Strengthened collaboration with key development partners on the
abandonment of FGM/C
- Existing theories on the functioning of harmful social norms
developed and applied to the specific realities of FGM/C
The
report also documents the following achievement for 2012:
- Activities designed to empower communities, girls and women took
place in programme countries. As a result, some 1,839 communities
representing 6,337,912 individuals made collective declarations of their
decision to abandon the practice
- Some 10,538 media events were carried out to transform the public
discourse around FGM/C; 378 TV and radio journalists received related
training
- Nearly 730 religious edicts delinking FGM/C and religion were
issued by religious leaders
- All forms of FGM/C were banned in Somalia’s constitution, adopted
in mid-2012 – a great feat in a country where FGM/C is nearly universal
- More than 3,000 judges, prosecutors, lawyers, magistrates, local
leaders and members of civil society organizations were sensitized about
laws prohibiting the practice of FGM/C which resulted in 220 legal actions
- Health policies now include provisions on the treatment of FGM/C in
nearly all the 15 countries
- Nearly 3144 health facilities offered integrated FGM/C prevention
and care; 2,690 health workers were trained in treatment and 60 in
prevention
- The monitoring and evaluation at both the global and country levels
has been improved with a focus in 2012 on building the capacity of those
on the ground.