Report Finds Gradual Fall in Female Genital Cutting in Africa

By Nicholas Loomis

The Fight Against Female Genital Cutting: New York Times reporter Celia Dugger reports from West Africa on progress in community-based efforts to eradicate female genital cutting.

A comprehensive new assessment of the ancient practice of female genital cutting has found a gradual but significant decline in many countries, even in some where it remains deeply entrenched.

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

Senegalese children gather for a Koran reading class given by Imam Moussa Diallo in the village of Hare Saruna, in southern Senegal. Once imams explained that cutting is not sanctioned or required by Islam, the practice began to be abandoned.

Teenage girls are now less likely to have been cut than older women in more than half of the 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East where the practice is concentrated, according to the assessment by the United Nations Children's Fund. In Egypt, for example, where more women have been cut than in any other nation, survey data showed that 81 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 percent of women in their late 40s.

The report's authors stress that the tradition still has a tenacious hold in many places, but they say the fledgling declines may foreshadow more generational change. In almost half of the 29 countries, young women were less likely to support the practice than older women. The difference in Egypt was especially stark: only a third of teenage girls who were surveyed thought it should continue, compared with almost two-thirds of older women.

"The fact that young women are against the practice in places like Egypt gives us hope that they will be able to stop the cutting of their daughters," said Claudia Cappa, lead author of the Unicef report. "We need to create conditions so they can act on their beliefs."

Over all, Unicef estimates that more than 125 million girls and women have undergone the practice and that 30 million girls are at risk of it over the coming decade. The report, released Monday, is the first in which Unicef assessed the practice among all age groups based on household survey data from all of the 29 countries. Its last report, issued eight years ago, was based on 30 surveys in 20 of the countries; the new study includes 74 surveys done in 29 countries over two decades.

The report depicts progress against female genital cutting as halting and uneven. It also offers a portrait of nations where its prevalence is still stunningly high. In addition to Egypt, where 91 percent of women 15 to 49 have undergone the practice, countries with the highest percentages of women who have been cut include Somalia, at 98 percent; Guinea, at 96 percent; Djibouti, at 93 percent; Eritrea and Mali, at 89 percent; and Sierra Leone and Sudan, at 88 percent.

Unicef found that the steepest declines in the prevalence of the practice, also known as female genital mutilation, have occurred in Kenya, one of Africa's most dynamic and developed nations, and — most surprisingly — in the Central African Republic, one of its poorest and least developed.

Researchers now say the prevalence of the practice in these two countries began to fall four or five decades ago. They said the progress made sense in Kenya, where efforts to stop female genital cutting stretch to the early 1900s, but they were at a loss to explain why it had plunged in the Central African Republic, to 24 percent in 2010 from 43 percent in the mid-1990s.

"We have no idea, not even a guess," said Bettina Shell-Duncan, an anthropology professor at the University of Washington who was a consultant on the report. Professor Shell-Duncan said researchers needed to get to the Central African Republic soon to figure out what was happening there.

The country has received no significant foreign aid to combat the practice that Unicef researchers knew of, and it has been the subject of no scholarly study that they could find.

While experts were amazed about the Central African Republic, they were disappointed that no significant decline had been detected in Senegal between the surveys done in 2005 and 2010-11. Tostan, a human rights group whose name means "breakthrough," has led a much-hailed and growing social movement there to stop the practice, with support from Unicef and other donors. Thousands of villages working with the group have declared their intent to abandon genital cutting.

Molly Melching, Tostan's executive director, said in an e-mail that the momentum in Senegal had accelerated in the past five years and that changes would probably become visible only in 2020, as girls who would otherwise have been cut grow old enough to be interviewed in household surveys. She also noted that the national surveys had not specifically sampled the villages where Tostan worked or evaluated the group's impact.

Mrs. Cappa, of Unicef, acknowledged Ms. Melching's points but said "the real surprise for Senegal" was that support for the practice among women and girls had not noticeably declined.

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