#3 Meet the faith leader changing people’s beliefs toward FGM practice

Osman Ali Ismail lives in Aden Saleban village, Burao. The father of 12 children (six of them girls) has been advocating against the practice of FGM and more broadly for the protection of children’s rights, for the last four years now.

What motivated me to advocate for the protection of children’s rights was after World Vision conducted a training on the topic. That caught my interest and I understood after, I had an important role to play. 

“I feel like the trainings conducted by World Vision were meant to first change my thinking personally from which then I would take the learnings back to my family then to the community,” Osman says.

Osman shares that after the trainings, he started to make changes in his own family. First, he vowed that his daughters wouldn’t undergo FGM after openly discussing the negative effects of the practice with his wife.

Osman who is also a member of the community Child Protection committee spends his weekends doing outreaches. We really try to reach to the mothers. “I remember, 80-100 women attended the first anti-FGM awareness campaign we held. I have encouraged them to ask for forgiveness from their daughters they have already made to undergo FGM.”

To defeat FGM, advocacy efforts must be complemented by legal enforcement 

We’ve also been doing outreach to the fathers and most of them have agreed to stop FGM. Osman advises fathers to protect their daughters the same as they protect their sons.

But he admits it’s not an easy undertaking. “When you embark on a journey to stand against a practice that the community has known and believed since their existence, it’s difficult,” he notes.

One of the major challenges is convincing the very old women. They are hostile to the idea and information against FGM, and they react with hostility to our interventions.

At times we encounter parents who strongly believe that the practice will protect their daughters from bad behaviours. With that thinking it becomes difficult to make the mothers understand that good behaviour is more of an outcome of their environment and the values parents instill in their children as they are brought up, and less from undergoing FGM.

 That said, Osman says it will take time and that continuous awareness raising is very critical. 

Farah agrees with Sheikh Osman adding that the elimination of the practice will require more than advocacy efforts such as hers. 

“if legal actions are not enforced against perpetrators, then these efforts might be as good as futile,” she notes.

In the meantime, she chooses to be proud of her advocacy efforts that she credits in part to changing the community’s attitude. “We’ve been able to create spaces for conversations and dialogue, at least people began to tolerate the idea of talking about it and slowly accepting the idea that the practice should have no place in the society,” she says.

The fact that we have mothers who decided not to have their daughters undergo ‘the cut’ because of our advocacy efforts, this is significant.

With funding from Korea, World Vision has trained over 50 Faith leaders in Bur’ao, engaged traditional, religious leaders and the government in fostering dialogues on FGM, as well as pushing for the review and enforcement of policies that support FGM abandonment.

World Vision has been an active participant in high-level inter-ministerial workshops for FGM policy finalization and in collaboration with the Ministry of Employment, Social Affairs and Family (MESAF) has partnered on joint advocacy efforts to end FGM.

World Vision is also actively working with 15 anti-FGM champions and 90 community members.

Article by Muna Cabdi, Communications Officer based in Hargeisa, Somaliland