A girl who is cut is usually married off soon after, and a girl who is married is usually pulled out of school. Once she has been
out of school for a term or more, returning becomes harder, and many girls never return at all. Both practices are illegal in
Kenya. Both continue in communities where enforcement is weak and where the practices are upheld by tradition, by poverty, and by
the belief that a girl's value lies in her marriage rather than in her own future.
We work to end both practices, and we work to support the girls who have already been affected by them. The work is not a single
programme. It is a set of connected activities that address the beliefs that sustain the practices, the economics that drive them,
and the systems that are meant to stop them. We do not approach communities as though they need to be told what is wrong. We
approach them as partners in protecting their own daughters, and we work alongside the people whose voices carry weight in the
places where these decisions are made.
We do not expect these practices to end in a single campaign, or in a single year. The beliefs that sustain them took generations
to form, and they will not dissolve quickly. What we work for is the shift that begins when a parent decides not to cut her
daughter, when a leader refuses to officiate at a marriage, when a girl knows she can say no, when a boy says he would not want
this for his sister. These shifts accumulate. Over time, they change what a community treats as normal. That is how these
practices end — not through a single intervention, but through a community deciding, over and over again, that its daughters
deserve better.
