Edna Adan deplores the cutting and says that international campaigns are ineffective, never reaching ordinary Somali women. As we were driving through the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa, she pointed suddenly to a banner across the road that denounced cutting. “So the UN comes and puts up banners in the capital,” she said. “What does that do? It doesn’t make a bit of difference. The women can’t even read the signs.” Indeed, the international denunciations of FGM prompted a defensive backlash in some countries, leading tribal groups to rally around cutting as a tradition under attack by outsiders.
Opponents eventually became smarter and backed off a bit, often using the more neutral term “female genital cutting,” or FGC. At least that didn’t imply that the women they were reaching out to were mutilated, which made it awkward to continue the conversation. More important, leadership passed to African women like Edna, since they can speak with far more authority and persuasiveness than foreigners.
Perhaps the most successful effort to end cutting is that of Tostan, a West African group that takes a very respectful approach and places FGC within a larger framework of community development. Rather than lecturing the women, the program’s representatives encourage villagers to discuss the human rights and health issues related to cutting and then make their own choices. The program’s soft sell has worked far better than the hard sell.
Tostan was founded by Molly Melching, a hearty woman from Danville, Illinois, who still looks and sounds like the solid Midwesterner she is. Molly’s high school French class led her to a fascination with all things French. She studied in France and worked in a slum largely inhabited by North Africans outside Paris. Eventually she traveled to Senegal in 1974 on a scholarly exchange program that was supposed to last six months. Molly is still there.
A born linguist, Molly began to learn a Senegalese local language, Wolof, and then signed up for the Peace Corps in Senegal. Molly ran a radio program in Wolof. Later, from 1982 to 1985, she found herself living in a village working on education and empowerment efforts with a small grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“Not one person in the village had been to school,” Molly recalled. “There was no school. This was a village of wonderful people who were as smart as could be but just had never been to school, and who very much needed information.” The experience—plus a stint as an independent evaluator of aid programs—fed in Molly a suspicion of big aid projects. She was living as Senegalese do and flinched as she saw foreign aid workers squired around in SUVs. She also observed aid programs that spent primarily on expatriate staff and didn’t know what they were doing. Without local buy-in, a well-meaning group would build a clinic and outfit it with drugs—and then the villagers would divide the clinic’s beds among themselves, and the doctor would sell the medicines in the market. “Senegal seemed like a cemetery of aid projects that weren’t working,” she says bluntly.
Molly Melching with women in a Tostan program in Senegal who have given up genital cutting (Tostan)
Molly evaluated literacy programs by going to 240 literacy centers—and found them mostly failures. “What I found were classes where there were supposed to be fifty students, but nobody would be there,” she said. “Or everybody would be falling asleep.” Likewise, she saw Westerners thundering against genital cutting and trying to pass laws against it, without actually going out in the countryside to understand why mothers cut their daughters.
“Law is a quick-fix solution, and then people think you don’t have to do anything else,” Molly said. “The real thing that will make a difference is education.” When Senegal debated a law to ban cutting, Molly initially opposed it, for fear that it would inflame ethnic politics and stir a backlash (the majority ethnic group does not cut girls, so minorities would feel imposed upon). These days she is ambivalent about the law: While passage did create a backlash, it also signaled to villagers the severity of the health concerns about cutting.
In her own family, Molly saw how peer pressure for cutting was more powerful than any law. Molly had married a Senegalese man, and they had a daughter named Zoé—who made a startling demand.
“I want to be cut,” Zoé told her mother. “I promise I won’t cry.” All of Zoé’s friends were being cut, and she didn’t want to be left out. Molly wasn’t that indulgent a mom, and the girl changed her mind when she was told what the procedure entailed. The incident convinced Molly that the key to ending cutting would be changing village attitudes as a whole.
In 1991, she formally launched Tostan to focus on education in poor villages. Typically, Tostan will send a local trainer into a village to begin a major educational program that includes units on democracy, human rights, problem-solving, hygiene, health, and management skills. The village has to actively participate by providing a teaching space, tables and chairs, students, and room and board for the teacher. Men and women alike participate in the classes, which last for three years and involve a significant commitment of time: three sessions a week of two or three hours each. The program also includes training for village leaders, formation of community management committees, and a microcredit system to encourage small businesses. Following the lead of local women, Tostan is very careful to avoid antagonizing village men.
“We did a segment on women’s rights for a while, and that just built opposition,” Molly said. “Some of the men closed our centers, they were so angry. So we sat down and rewrote the whole module and did ‘people’s rights’ instead—democracy and people’s rights. Then we had the men behind us, too. The men just want to be included; they don’t want to be seen as the enemy.”
Tostan sometimes angers feminists for its cautious approach and for its reluctance to use the word “mutilation” or even say that it is fighting against genital cutting. Instead, it relentlessly tries to stay positive, preparing people to make their own decisions. The curriculum includes a nonjudgmental discussion of human rights and health issues related to cutting, but it never advises parents to stop cutting their daughters. Still, the program broke a taboo by discussing cutting, and once women thought about it and realized that cutting wasn’t universal, they began to worry about the health risks. In 1997, a group of thirty-five women attending a class in a village called Malicounda Bambara took a historic step: They announced that they would stop cutting their daughters.
From the outside, it looked like a breakthrough, and it was hailed as such. Close up, it was a disaster. Other villagers excoriated the women who made the announcement as unfeminine and un-African and accused them of taking money from white people to betray their Bambara ethnic group. The women were in tears for months and worried that they were sentencing their daughters to be spinsters. Molly decided that Tostan had erred in allowing a single village to make the announcement. After consulting a local religious leader, she came to see that cutting is a social convention linked to marriage, so that no one family can stop cutting on its own without harming its daughters’ marriage prospects.
“Everybody has to change together, or you will never be able to marry your daughter,” Molly says. “My mother put me in braces, and I bled and I cried for two years, and an African woman could have come over and said: ‘How can you do this to your daughter?’ And my mother would have said, ‘I saved from my little salary to straighten my daughter’s teeth, so she can get married. How dare you say I am cruel!’”
The entire marrying group must make the decision to drop cutting collectively. So Tostan began helping groups identify the other villages that commonly supply their marriage partners and then organizing intervillage discussions of cutting. Tostan also helps women organize joint declarations that they have abandoned the practice, and this approach has worked stunningly well. Between 2002 and 2007, more than 2,600 villages announced that they had ceased cutting. “It’s accelerating,” Molly said, adding that Tostan’s goal is to end all cutting in Senegal by 2012.
In 2008, Senegal’s government reviewed all the country’s efforts to end genital cutting, a
nd it concluded that Tostan was the only program achieving significant results. It then adopted Tostan’s approach as a national model. A few days later, health officials from across that region in West Africa also embraced the Tostan model as part of a regional strategy to end cutting.
Tostan has already moved on to work in Gambia, Guinea, and Mauritania, and it has also opened up programs in Somalia and Djibouti in East Africa. Molly says it is finding a receptive audience to its bottom-up approach in each country. Tostan’s work has gained praise from a host of international agencies, and in 2007 it won the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize and a UNESCO Prize. The recognition has helped win Tostan financial support from private donors as well as from UNICEF and American Jewish World Service, allowing it to expand at a steady pace. To encourage donors, Tostan has developed its own sponsorship plan: Donors can “adopt” a particular village of about eight hundred people and pay $12,000 for the three-year program there.
Molly is the only Westerner on staff for Tostan in Africa, although there are two Americans working in a Washington, D.C., office to raise funds and publicize the organization. The emphasis on local staff in Africa has also enabled Tostan to become unusually cost-effective, partly because Molly pays herself just $48,000 annually. Now the test is whether her model will succeed as well in Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, and Central African Republic—some of which are wracked by conflict that makes work in these countries dangerous. There is a long history of projects that work well on a small scale but falter when introduced across Africa. Early signs, in Somalia at least, are encouraging, and Molly is already wondering aloud whether the Tostan model could be used to help end other pernicious social customs such as honor killings.
Elsewhere in Africa, other groups are also gaining momentum against genital cutting. Leading Egyptians are increasingly speaking out against the practice, and other aid groups, including CARE, are doing pathbreaking work. Some local grassroots groups in Ethiopia and Ghana have been particularly impressive. Bill Foege, a legendary figure in public health who helped eradicate smallpox, believes that genital cutting is finally on its way out, largely because of the work of Molly and the staff at Tostan.
“They have done what UN conferences, endless resolutions, and government statements have failed to do,” Foege told us. “When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women. Tostan has demonstrated that empowerment is contagious, accomplished person by person and spreading village by village.”
Painstakingly, the world is learning some important lessons from the fieldwork of groups like Tostan. One is that progress really is possible; challenges are insurmountable only until the moment that they’re surmounted. And we’re gaining a much better tactical sense of how to do the surmounting. Big efforts that failed—the campaign in the 1970s and 1980s against FGM and the missions by Westerners to Afghanistan with the lofty goal of empowering women—fell short because they were decreed by foreigners high up in the treetops. Local people were consulted only in a perfunctory manner. The impulse of Westerners to hold conferences and change laws has, on one issue after another, proved remarkably ineffective.* As Mary Robinson, the former Irish president who later served as a terrific UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said: “Count up the results of fifty years of human rights mechanisms, thirty years of multi-billion-dollar development programs and endless high-level rhetoric, and the global impact is quite underwhelming. This is a failure of implementation on a scale which shames us all.”
In contrast, look at some of the projects that have made a stunning difference: Tostan, Kashf, Grameen, the CARE project in Burundi, BRAC, the Self Employed Women’s Association in India, Apne Aap. The common thread is that they are grassroots projects with local ownership, sometimes resembling social or religious movements more than traditional aid projects. Often they have been propelled by exceptionally bright and driven social entrepreneurs who had encountered the “treetops” efforts and modified them to create far more effective bottom-up models. That is a crucial way forward for a new international movement focusing on women in the developing world.
Girls Helping Girls
The frontline in the grassroots war against the abuse of women may be in Africa and Asia, but Jordana Confino has figured out how to make a contribution while attending high school in Westfield, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. With her long, dirty-blond hair, Jordana could have just alighted from a prom queen’s throne. She enjoyed an upper-middle-class upbringing, oozes self-confidence, expects equal rights as her birthright—and was deeply troubled when she appreciated how unusual her privileged status is.
Jordana and the high school students she works with are reminders that the rise of social entrepreneurship has also facilitated the rise of the part-time aid worker—even one sitting in a high school classroom. In Jordana’s case, her initiative started when she was about ten years old and her mother, Lisa Alter, tried to expose her daughters to problems in the rest of the world. Lisa would point out news articles or tell them about challenges faced by girls abroad: See how lucky you have it here in New Jersey. Lisa discovered that Jordana was far more moved by the horrors than she had expected.
“We talked about the articles, and especially those that were about girls,” Jordana remembered. “Some of the topics were very upsetting, including female genital mutilation, the abandonment of baby girls in China, child labor. Around this time there were also a number of public stories about the Taliban ban on girls’ education in Afghanistan. We talked as a family about how hard it must be for girls to escape abuse if they could not even read or write. I have to admit that the problems seemed too big for us to do anything about, but we began to brainstorm about what we might do if we got a group of girls together.”
The idea fermented in the back of Jordana’s mind. In the eighth grade, she teamed up with a girlfriend and began to talk seriously about starting a club focusing on these issues. Lisa and the friend’s mother helped them make plans, and they all attended a United Nations conference on women and girls. Jordana was moved by the stories she heard and switched into high gear. She and her friend soon started Girls Learn International (www.girlslearninternational.org) to raise money for girls’ education abroad. They made calls, put up posters, sent out letters. Jordana started visiting other schools to drum up volunteers. By the time she was in high school, she was a crusader for Girls Learn International, and the group was gathering chapters around the country.
Jordana Confino at a conference on girls’ education (Lisa Alter)
Jordana gave the keynote address during an end-of-year assembly at the Young Women’s Leadership School in the Bronx, reminding members of the audience that while they might have encountered their own difficulties, girls in other countries were struggling for food and shelter, let alone the luxury of attending school. Jordana was practically the only white girl in the room. But she had become a role model for many girls her age, as she talked about the challenges around the globe.
“In 2007, nearly sixty-six million girls do not have access to education in communities across the world,” she said. As these girls grow up, she continued, “they join the ranks of illiterate girls, increasing the gender gap between men and women…. Girls who are denied access to education are more likely to be trapped in a cycle of poverty and disease, forced into child marriage and prostitution, become victims of sex trafficking, domestic violence, and so-called honor killings.”
Girls Learn now has more than twenty chapters in high schools and middle schools around the country and is working on an affiliated college program as well. Some of the girls start out just trying to polish their activities lists for college applications, but many of them become moved by the foreign students they learn about and ultimately are passionate about the cause.
Each chapter of Girls Learn is paired with a partner class in a poor country where girls traditionally do not get much education: Afghanistan, Colombia, Costa Rica,
El Salvador, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda, Vietnam. The American girls raise money to help their partners and upgrade the foreign schools. Jordana, for instance, helped improve the office of Mukhtar Mai, the anti-rape campaigner in rural Pakistan. When Mukhtar Mai e-mails us to inform us of the latest threats against her, she does it with a computer and Internet hookup that Girls Learn paid for.
Girls Learn partners are chosen mostly by the connections cultivated by Jordana, her mother, and a professional staff of two in an office in Manhattan. Each chapter is supposed to raise at least $500 a year, and the kids have raised a cumulative total of about $50,000, which goes exclusively to partner classrooms abroad. Supporting grown-ups separately raise more than $100,000 annually to cover administrative expenses. That means that Girls Learn isn’t the most efficient charity around to support girls’ education abroad, since far more money goes to administrative costs in Manhattan than to keep Pakistani girls in school. Still, the purpose of Girls Learn isn’t just to support girls’ education abroad but also to create exchanges and build the basis for a movement at home. As an educational venture for the American girls, it’s a bargain. American high school students who might otherwise be obsessed with designer bags are sending their spending money abroad so that girls in India can have notebooks.
“Talk about getting girls involved in the process,” said Cassidy DuRant-Green, a staff member of Girls Learn. “What better way to start than in middle school? We’re building leaders, women we could be working for in twenty years.” So while the ostensible aim is to empower girls in countries like Pakistan, some of the major beneficiaries are the American girls. You see that in Jordana, and the polish and passion she has found in her cause. In her speech in the Bronx, Jordana exuded maturity and empathy as she exhorted the students to support the Girls Learn chapter, noting that girls the same age as those in the audience are being trafficked or killed for “honor,” and she ended with a ringing crescendo: “Girls’ rights are human rights!”
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