Eliminating Female Genital Mutilation: Is the SDG Target in Reach?

Kathrin Weny , United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Romesh Silva
Berhanu Legesse, UNFPA
Rachel Snow, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Nafissatou Diop, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a harmful practice that violates the rights of women and girls. In the Sustainable Development Agenda, UN member states committed to eliminate FGM by 2030. To reach this goal, interventions need to be guided by the best available data. To date estimates and trends on the number of girls and women affected have been thwarted by the complexity of the data, the sparsity of information available, and by limitations of statistical programmes. The new estimates presented are based on nationally representative survey data since 1990. We model age patterns of FGM risk through survival analysis and obtain risk assessments by single year of age. We further fit a hierarchical model to estimate the effect of being born in later cohorts. We find that the likelihood of experiencing FGM has dramatically decreased over the last decades, but that the zero SDG target is out of reach.

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 Presented in Session 2. Children & Youth