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- info@sahiyo.org
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At Sahiyo, we believe that ending female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) starts with survivors and communities leading the conversation. However, we recognize many organizations and advocates face challenges due to limited tools, strategies, and guidance for effectively engaging impacted communities.
We created this toolkit to bridge that gap—offering ethical, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive engagement strategies drawn from the collective expertise of organizations across the United States working to address FGM/C.
“Community is the crux of our work. We’re here to serve, to learn from, and to reinvest into and just pour into our community. We have to be engaged with folks and understand, you know, kind of what’s going on in their lives to be able to do our work.”
~ Dianne Uwayo, African Family Health Organization (AFAHO)
“We want to also effect a change in behavior. So it’s why we try to engage the community. Because if they are not aware of the effects of this whole issue that we are talking about and they don’t know that you can have a complication that is relating to this [FGM/C] and they will not know. So if we do our work to engage them, hand out the flyers to Zoom meetings, training, we wanna hope that they will change, a behavioral change.”
~ Nettie Johnson, ACANA
“Unless you are engaged with the community, it’s very very hard to recruit women. They are culturally very sensitive. And they really don’t want to talk about it, about FGM/C, the harmful practice they have been through. For example, I am the impacted, the victim of FGM/C, I have the same experience as them and they feel comfortable to talk to me about it. They don’t trust you by the title, they trust you if you build a relationship with the community.”
~ Rufo Jiru, Anolee Sisters
“Community engagement means having ongoing conversations with the folks who are most affected by the practice, as well as those who want to be talking about the practice and working in this space. It means ensuring that we are trauma-informed and culturally attuned so that as we’re having those conversations, as we’re doing that active listening, we are again not applying our own preconceptions.”
~ Katharine Conroy, Sauti Yetu
On March 18th, 2024 Sahiyo, in partnership with RTI International, hosted a webinar titled “Pathways to Progress: Community Engagement in Ending Female Genital Cutting (FGC)” to discuss the role of community engagement in prevention efforts to raise awareness of FGM/C and support communities impacted by it.
Throughout the webinar, speakers uplifted their organization’s examples of effective outreach and education through various engagement strategies with individuals and communities impacted by FGM/C.
Features: Mariya Taher (Sahiyo), Samman Masud (Sahiyo), Wonder Guannu (African Cultural Alliance of North America), and Breanne Lash (Nile Sisters Development Initiative).
The development of this toolkit was made possible through the invaluable contributions of these supporting organizations:
