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Innovative solutions to eliminate FGM

UNFPA Egypt launched the Social Innovation Incubator in December 2021, aiming to engage girls and young women to design participatory solutions on ending FGM in their own communities. It ultimately enhances girls' and women's leadership and skills, while also utilizing an innovation accelerator methodology that provides opportunities to generate creative, and context-appropriate solutions.

The Social Innovation Incubator was piloted in Sohag, aiming at addressing grass-root challenges in the areas of reproductive health, family planning, maternal health, gender-based violence and harmful practices through innovative solutions, with the support of the Royal Norwegian Embassy.

The pilot program targets Sohag and its neighboring governorates, with the “Dafayer” initiative, which aims to employ innovative solutions to combat Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

The Social Innovation Incubator offers young people, development practitioners and social entrepreneurs, an opportunity to design innovative solutions to local developmental challenges under UNFPA’s mandate.

The teams were supported with both technical and financial support (minimal seed funding) to enable them to prototype/test their solutions and reach a minimum viable product (MVP).

Seven teams were selected to present their solutions and business models in the pitching event to a panel of experts and received guidance on their ideas. This is the story of one of those selected.

Photo credit: Roger Anis / UNFPA Egypt

Shaimaa Nabil’s mother did not know that her daughter got her first period until three years after. As a young girl, Shaima recalls, she was not used to talking to her mother about such matters. “The culture of dialogue between mother and daughter is not really common here when it comes to issues linked to adolescence and girl’s bodily changes,” 36-year-old Shaimaa says. Now, giving girls a space to express themselves is exactly what Shaimaa has set out to achieve. In a village in the Upper Egyptian governorate of Sohag, Shaimaa started ‘Hakawy Al-Baneta,’ or ‘Girls’ Stories,’ an initiative that provides a space for women and girls to acquire vocational skills while learning about harmful practices and other topics.

“I saw that technical education can be very useful for women, to provide them skills,” Shaimaa says, explaining that empowering women with skills and integrating meaningful awareness on issues linked to their lives such as FGM is essential in giving them control over their own lives. “Then the women and girls trusted me and started opening up to me,” she says. Shaimaa was first confronted with the issue of FGM, when 16-year-old Heidi, one of the girls who attend Shaimaa capacity building workshops, asked for her help in protecting her little sister from being cut. Shaimaa approached her mother and asked her why she wants to subject her daughter to this harmful practice and attempted to talk her out of it.

“This was my first confrontation with the issue of FGM, that is when I realized that it is something we need to tackle with the women and girls who attend the capacity building workshops,” she recalls. Combining the formats of a training and storytelling workshop, the initiative targets women in their 20s and 30s and girls aged 12 to 17. The workshops for either group have its own format. For women, it combines a training on a vocational skill such as resume writing, interview skills or baking, followed by a storytelling session. In some sessions, Shaimaa plays a video about the harms of the practice for example as the women engage in activities, to trigger the conversation.

“Sometimes I start the conversation by asking them things like, ‘tell us about the thing you love most, and the thing that caused you the most pain,’ and it becomes a storytelling session from there,” Shaimaa explains, “This helps women either deal with their trauma or listen to other success stories of women who survived to give them hope.” The story telling workshops turn into a women’s safe space where they can speak about their experience. For adolescent girls, Shaimaa explains that the session combines academic tutoring with conversations about menstrual health and hygiene, bodily autonomy and other age-appropriate topics. “To get the conversation going, I ask the girls what myths they have heard for example,” she says, “some girls open up and talk about their experiences.”

Working in an Upper Egyptian village, Shaimaa is climbing a steep hill. She explains that there is a heightened resistance to change in her community; an individual’s action is interdependent with others’. People are scared to go against the tide, she explains, even if they are no longer convinced with the practices they are accustomed to, they will be reluctant to announce it. “People always stick with what they know,” she says, “Even when it comes to crops, they choose to grow what everyone else is growing … Everyone grows onions, even if it is not very lucrative.”

But Shaimaa is only getting started. “Right now we are taking it slow and building a strong base for ourselves so we can push for more change.” Through her innovation programme, champions such as Shaimaa and other women like her have successfully managed to amplify interventions that expand collective knowledge about the harms of FGM.