Last August, a one-month-old girl in The Gambia bled to death after being subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM). While the practice has been banned by law since 2015, almost three in four Gambian women aged 15 to 49 have undergone FGM, around two-thirds before their fifth birthday. The Gambian Supreme Court is being asked to overturn the ban and is expected to rule in the next few months.

This is the second attempt in two years to make FGM legal again in The Gambia. Civil society stopped the first. When a repeal bill was introduced in the National Assembly in February 2024, the Network Against Gender-Based Violence, a coalition of Gambian civil society organisations, mobilised immediately. Campaigners ran billboard ads and radio programmes, lobbied legislators, and brought survivors to testify before the Assembly. They confronted religious arguments, obtaining a ruling from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the foremost authority in Sunni Islamic scholarship, that FGM isn’t required by Islam. After passing its second reading, the bill was rejected in July 2024, and The Gambia narrowly avoided becoming the first country in the world to reverse an FGM ban.

As the case moves through the Supreme Court, civil society is mobilising again. Women’s rights groups are bringing survivors to give evidence before the court. But harassment has intensified, with a wave of online abuse scaring some survivors into silence.

A practice in gradual retreat

Overall, more than 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM, including over 144 million in Africa, more than 80 million in Asia and six million-plus in the Middle East, with a further one to two million in smaller practising Indigenous and migrant communities around the world. Four in ten survivors live in conflict-affected and fragile settings, where services are stretched and prevention programmes are unreliable and prone to interruption. Around four million girls are cut every year.

In a March 2024 report, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found real but uneven progress in eradicating the practice. FGM is declining across many countries, and the pace, albeit still slow, has quickened, with half of the fall in numbers achieved over the past 30 years coming in the last decade. Several countries have made major advances, with prevalence among adolescent girls halved or dropping by 30-plus percentage points in countries including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Attitudes are shifting too, with around 400 million people in countries in Africa and the Middle East where FGM is practised – two-thirds of the population – saying they want it to end.

Under the Sustainable Development Goals agreed in 2015, states committed to eliminating FGM and all harmful practices against women and girls by 2030. Against this benchmark, change is nowhere near fast enough. While a few countries are on track, others, including The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Somalia, have made no significant progress. Rapid population growth means the total number of affected girls and women has risen by 30 million since 2016.

Progress is partly being offset by cutting happening at younger ages, shrinking the window for intervention. There’s also a growing medicalisation of FGM, where health workers do the cutting. This is marketed to parents as safer and cleaner, threatening to normalise and entrench the practice. It makes FGM look more respectable, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a form of gender-based violence aimed at achieving control over women’s bodies.

Civil society driving change

The Joint Programme on the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation – the biggest global effort to end FGM, run by UNICEF and the UN Population Fund since 2008 – assesses that the greatest reductions occur where communities are supported to deliberate on the practice and commit publicly and collectively to abandoning it.

This is where civil society makes a difference. The Joint Programme, active in 18 countries, works in partnership with civil society, governments and religious leaders. It channels UN funding and provides coordination, but the dialogues, declarations and door-to-door persuasion are the work of community activists, national organisations and survivor networks. In 2025, over 7.5 million people took part in community dialogues, 4.3 million made public declarations to abandon the practice, and more than 190,000 religious leaders and community influencers publicly denounced it. Sustained engagement with senior religious authorities has helped gradually dismantle theological justifications in countries where these carry significant weight. Over 1.2 million men and boys also took part in activities and around 1.8 million girls and young women joined life-skills and behaviour-change programmes.

Services have expanded in parallel. Over 2.2 million girls and women received prevention and protection services in 2025, a 54 per cent increase on the previous year, and more than 560,000 received FGM-related healthcare, counselling and referrals, a fivefold increase.

Civil society tactics

Much of the progress has come from long-term local-level work. In Sierra Leone, where girls are cut in initiation rites, a growing number of activists are promoting a different kind of initiation that retains the communal ritual while leaving out the cutting. Among them is Nenneh Rugiatu Abu Koroma, whose work to shift attitudes and promote the adoption of this model earned her Germany’s Theodor Haecker Human Rights Prize.

The same patient method of working with authority figures to shift their stance on the practice has produced results in the Horn of Africa, where campaigners have focused on stripping away the religious justification that sustains FGM. As a result, in 2025, Islamic scholars in Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia issued a joint ruling stating that nothing in the faith requires FGM.

Litigation is another effective civil society tool. On 8 July 2025, in a case brought by two organisations, the Forum Against Harmful Practices and We Are Purposeful, together with survivor Kadijatu Balaima Allieu, the Economic Community of West African States Court of Justice found Sierra Leone in breach of its international obligations for failing to criminalise FGM. The court stated that FGM is among the worst forms of violence against women and, when intentionally inflicted, meets the threshold of torture. It ordered Sierra Leone to legislate, investigate, prosecute and pay compensation to the victim.

The same tactic is being tested in India, where campaigners have gone to the Supreme Court, which began hearing arguments in April on whether FGM among the Dawoodi Bohra community counts as an essential religious practice, and therefore enjoys constitutional protection. Survivor-led organisations put together the evidence that made the case possible, including a survey that showed around 75 per cent of Bohra women had been cut. On 7 May, the case saw the first real progress in nine years, as the judges suggested the practice might be curtailed on grounds of public health and morality.

In a region rarely associated with FGM, campaigning recently produced a major legislative breakthrough. On 10 June, after years of advocacy led by Indigenous women, Colombia’s Senate passed the Girls Without Ablation Law, making Colombia the first country in Latin America to ban FGM. In Colombia, the practice is concentrated among the Emberá Indigenous community, and it was Emberá women who drove the law through. Survivors and community leaders spent years persuading the state to treat FGM as a rights violation instead of an acceptable cultural practice. The final vote almost never came. The bill sat at the bottom of the agenda and only cleared its final hurdle days before the deadline expired, on the eve of a presidential runoff few legislators wanted to complicate.

It helped that campaigners had built pressure regionally. In November 2025, the Americas Alliance to End FGM/C secured the first Inter-American Commission on Human Rights hearing on FGM, which heard testimony from survivors from several countries, including Colombia, and called on states across the region to act.

In Europe, the End FGM European Network launched its Care in Action campaign at the European Parliament on 5 February. Following up on the 2025 #Invest2PreventFGM campaign, which centred funding and prevention, the current campaign emphasises the need for investment in prevention, protection and survivor care to be built into everyday public services rather than provided through short bursts of funding. The campaign focuses particularly on school holiday periods when girls in Europe are most at risk of being taken abroad to be cut, and seeks to wrest the language of protection back from anti-rights movements, which increasingly use rhetoric about FGM to attack migrants.

International networks are playing a vital part. The Global Platform for Action to End FGM/C, which brings together global organisations and regional networks, gives national campaigners access to global policy spaces they otherwise wouldn’t be heard in. The Americas Alliance to End FGM/C supported the breakthrough in Colombia, and the End FGM/C Africa Network ensures a win in one country becomes leverage in the next.

The anti-FGM movement continues to evolve. At the Women Deliver conference in April, The Girl Generation, Healing Equity United and Sahiyo published a position paper on racism in anti-FGM advocacy, arguing that Black and Brown campaigners are often pushed to the margins, grassroots groups treated as passive recipients of help and affected communities reduced to their suffering. At the 2026 session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the End FGM European Network acknowledged that survivor-led organisations are consistently overlooked in decision-making and chronically starved of funds.

Legal change and its limits

Much of this decades-long effort aimed to change the law, and largely succeeded. Prohibition is now the norm. Criminal laws against FGM exist in most affected countries, and Djibouti and Guinea wrote the ban into their national constitutions in 2025. Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone and Somalia are now the outliers. While Somalia introduced a constitutional ban in 2025, the country still lacks a unified national criminal law punishing the practice.

But there’s often a wide gap between what criminal codes say and what happens on the ground. Enforcement, while growing, remains limited. In 2025, arrests doubled and cases brought to court rose by 76 per cent, but there were still only 711 recorded court cases.

The Gambia banned FGM in 2015, but the first convictions came only in 2023, when three women were found guilty of cutting eight girls, one of them just four months old. Their punishment was a fine, which was paid by a prominent imam. The case galvanised the campaign to repeal the ban. Enforcement remains the exception. In May 2026, the High Court acquitted three women charged over an infant’s death, finding that prosecutors hadn’t proved their case.

Campaigners also know that bans can drive the practice underground, causing families to cut girls younger to avoid detection or move them across borders, including when they travel from Europe during school holidays. Civil society has begun to tackle this evasion directly. A project in Kenya, for instance, used a digital alert system to connect frontline organisations, chiefs and rescue centres during school holidays, helping protect over 1,600 girls by identifying those in immediate danger.

Progress at risk

The tactics that have driven three decades of progress are now being defunded, and the blow is falling hardest on survivor-led and grassroots organisations, which are among the most effective but have long struggled to secure enough support.

Funding for the Joint Programme fell from US$29.6 million in 2024 to US$16.3 million in 2025. The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development removed the largest bilateral funding source for civil society worldwide. Overall, US foreign aid spending fell from US$68 billion in 2024 to US$32 billion in 2025.

The UK was once the biggest single funder of FGM prevention. It provided around US$113 million over a decade, mostly through The Girl Generation programme. But the government is cutting aid so it can spend more on weapons, and is winding the programme down in October with no replacement planned. The decision has brought warnings from parliamentary committees that ending support will endanger girls, including in the UK, where an estimated 137,000 women have undergone the practice and cases are rising.

Defunding is indefensible even on the basis of narrow economic considerations. According to the World Health Organization, every dollar invested in prevention brings a tenfold return, and a US$2.8 billion investment would prevent 20 million cases. The Joint Programme estimates that treating the health complications of FGM costs US$1.4 billion a year, while it would cost US$2.4 billion to eliminate the practice in 31 priority countries.

Shifting politics are driving defunding and challenging momentum in other ways. In Europe, far-right parties invoke the practice to stigmatise migrant communities while simultaneously opposing the gender justice policies that would help address it. In countries that retain the practice, prohibition is being increasingly recast as a foreign imposition restricting cultural and religious freedoms. What these approaches have in common is that they treat FGM as a matter of culture and identity rather than a violation of fundamental human rights.

Elimination by 2030 is out of reach. But states that value human rights can join civil society in protecting as many of the estimated 22.7 million girls at risk as possible. European Union states have until 14 June 2027 to comply with Directive 2024/1385 on combating violence against women, which requires them to criminalise FGM as a standalone offence. FGM is already illegal across the bloc, but half its members still prosecute the practice under general criminal law rather than as a distinct crime. To really make a difference, law changes should be backed up with funding for community prevention and survivor care.

The evidence on what works isn’t in dispute. Support must be rebalanced towards the community level, health systems reoriented towards prevention, and prevention prioritised in domestic budgets, so it no longer depends on decisions swayed by changing global north politics. For any hope of further progress, it’s vital that the civil society movements that are making change happen are supported and sustained.

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