Mar 9, 2019
Activists say female genital mutilation is still common in Africa - but a study finds it is falling.
There’s been a massive fall in FGM rates across the African continent for girls under 14.
The figures are all taken roughly 20 years apart, in the mid 90s and then in the late 2010s. The rate in Western African has gone from 74% to 25%, in Northern Africa it’s gone from 60% to 14%.
Across the continent the overall rate has gone from 71% to 8%.
This is just huge. I’m finding it difficult to wrap my head around the scale of it, the number of children those percentages represent. It feels like such a huge shift. It’s millions of girls growing up safer and healthier.
And the researchers are saying their mothers are the driving force.
