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Media focus on FGM
MS Kenya partner Yiaku People’s Association have been talking against Female Genitale Mutilation in several nationwide media over the past few weeks
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Jennifer Koinante, coordinator Yiaku People's Association
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Nationwide media such as Capital news and East African Standard have in August had a focus on the practice of FGM among the Yiaku People considered to be one of the Masai clans in Laikipia.
Jennifer Koinante, the coordinator of Yiaku People’s Association (YPA), has explained through the media how hundreds of girls are withdrawn from schools and married off after being cut.
On Capital news Kointante said the retrogressive practice had rendered local women illiterate, since they do not go past primary school level. Parents, she said, force their daughters to take part the cut, while morans target the girls for sex after they are circumcised.
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Peresian Sadira is one of the masai girls who were to be circumcised and married away. But staff from MS and Yiaku People's Association managed to convince the family to send her to school instead.
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In the East African Standard Jennifer Koinante appeared in interviews explaining that most of the girls who get circumcised, are married off to elderly men, making their marriages incompatible.
Koinante observed that the children are married off after undergoing FGM, which poses a health risk to the young women, especially when being cut and while giving birth. "Two years ago, two girls died of complications caused when undergoing FGM," said Koinante.
According to World Health Organisation estimates, between 10 and 20 of every 1,000 babies born in Africa die as a direct result of FGM. "Over 90 per cent of all women aged over 20 in Laikipia North are circumcised, a situation which makes it difficult to eradicate the practice since mothers force their daughters undergo the cut," Koinante lamented in the East African.
