USAID award no. 698-0541-G-00-7015-00 to the Federation of Women Groups Nyamira District to provide support a program in female genital mutilation elimination

The Federation will train 500 women from villages in the District to serve as trainers for the program. These women will travel throughout Nyamira, record the names of young girls who are to be circumcised in 1997, 1998, or 1999, and use individual counseling and group seminars to educate the girls and their families, particularly mothers, on the danger of female genital mutilation. Using slides, films, and video cassettes from cultures that have given up the practice of female circumcision, the trainers will demonstrate the erroneousness of the view commonly held in Nyamira that a circumcised girl aged 8-12 is a mature woman able to handle her wifely duties. They will explain that early marriage, for which female circumcision is considered a preparation, results in broken homes, high population (the average Kisii woman is pressured to produce 8-15 children), food shortages, environmental degradation, poor education, and poverty. The trainers will stress the fact that uncircumcised girls will be able to attend school, and thus become employed and improve their own and the community"s economic status. Some of the girls and their families and some of the trainers will tour places where circumcision has either been eliminated or is being eliminated: Meru, Central Province, Nyeri, Kirinyaga District, Kericho District, Baringo, Kajiado, and Narok. An initial pilot project will run for 7 months, just in time to spare the young girls who would be circumcised in December 1997. A second phase will begin in January 1998, after the success of the 1997 pilot project has been evaluated in terms of the reactions of the girls who have been spared and the reactions of their parents and the community-at-large.