The End FGM EU Secretariat began last season with bittersweet news and saw the departure of Amal Hussein Ismail, our amazing team member and ESC Programmes volunteer. Thank you, Amal, for all your hard work done for the Network in the past year ! Your dedication is part of the reason why we can say this summer has so many exciting projects coming in together! 

The End FGM European Network had the amazing pleasure of reuniting our Board, Members, Ambassadors and Secretariat in another successful General Assembly! With enormous gratitude, we said our goodbyes to Sonia Duarte Lopes and Hayat Traspas, who stepped down from the Board after amazing mandates full of commitment, and we welcomed five new Board Members! The new composition of the Board is entirely made up of inspiring women coming from communities affected by FGM. We warmly welcome the following to the Board: Aminata Sibidé, Etenesh Hadis, Fatumata Kromah, Marly Bah and Rukio Omer!

We are thrilled to announce that, following this GA, we also have four new Member organisations joining the Network and one organisation stepping into a Full Membership! We offer our congratulations to ActionAid Italy, Existera (Sweden), TAMA (Malta), Women of Grace (UK), and our existent Associate, now a Full Member, KONE (Germany)!

You can find more about our General Assembly in 2023 in the updates below! 

On the 6th and 7th June 2023, we welcomed our End FGM EU Members and Ambassadors in Brussels for our General Assembly. Our GA is always a decisive moment - every year, we come together with our Board, Members and Ambassadors, to reflect on our achievements, open the floor to new candidates, and outline our direction for the future. See what happened this year!

Every year, we use our Annual Campaign as a way to raise awareness on a specific aspect of our work to end FGM in Europe & beyond. At the beginning of our campaign in 2023, we asked a few key questions: what is the best path to end FGM? What stops does it have on the road? What can grassroots expertise teach us about concrete ways to navigate it?

We aim to answer these questions by publishing resources, gathering insights from experts and community activists, and creating networks of cross-sector solidarity. Luckily, our Members are fully on board and more than happy to contribute to this! Below you can find two of the many exciting videos that will delve in-depth on our Members' work throughout this year's campaign.

Hope Turner tells us how AkiDwA became a reference point for maternity care providers in Ireland and what the rest of the world can do to implement dignified public healthcare.

Hellen Namuli from UNAF tells us why Survivor support groups are key to providing for their needs, as well as why working with intercultural mediators can be so helpful.

Let's have a look at all the steps our Ambassadors have taken on the Road to end FGM this summer! From conferences to trainings and community workshops, our Ambassadors have been busy these past few months... and we are sure their plans for the future are even more exciting!

On 10-11th May, the Board of End FGM EU met in London with a full agenda. Aminata Bah, Cynthia Karanja, Hayat Traspas and Sonia Duarte Lopes gathered with the Network's Director Anna Widegren for the meeting. While in the UK, the Board took the opportunity to meet with End FGM EU's London-based Members: Forward UK, National FGM Centre and Orchid Project.

Each year the End FGM European Network publishes its Annual Report, which takes a comprehensive look at the Network's achievements, activities, and data gathered throughout the year. In 2022, there are a lot of things to be proud of - and a lot of ingredients added to the recipe for ending harmful practices and creating a world that is safe for all! You are welcome to access this report below and look back on this transformative year.

End FGM EU is thrilled to co-host the Women Deliver 2023 Conference (WD2023), the only Pre-conference dedicated to FGM. The event will take place in  Kigali, Rwanda on 17-20 July 2023, and will bring together global CSOs working towards ending FGM. We look forward to connecting with stakeholders and other organisations that strive towards a future that is safe, inclusive and equal for all.

End FGM EU and OII Europe are holding mutual trainings on FGM (female genital mutilation) and IGM (intersex genital mutilation). The trainings aim to identify the common talking points around the issues of FGM and IGM, while understanding and contextualising the differences between them.

On the 17th of May, we talked about the intersection between LGBTI rights & FGM Survivors by sharing our infographic with ILGA Europe.

For 16 June, we addressed the increased risk faced by children in Europe, including children of African descent, during summer holidays. We shared a resource from the Community of Practice on cross-border FGM.

On the 20th of June, we discussed the importance of putting refugees at the heart of our movement to end FGM, and shared our paper on asylum laws and their implication for people at risk.

On the 1st of June 2023, the EU acceded to the Istanbul Convention. It marks a crucial step towards the elimination of gender-based violence (GBV) and harmful practices such as FGM. We look forward to seeing the same decision adopted by the Member States who have not ratified the IC yet, so that the shared goals of sustainable development can be achieved by all.

Continuing on the #Road2EndFGM, we explored the need for cultural sensitivity and the ways in which it can be implemented among professionals dealing with affected communities.

As part of our Annual Campaign discussing important practices, we shared our resource with the European Disability Forum on the importance of ensuring safe care for everyone.

We delved into an issue that is less often discussed, but a key point when it comes to medicalisation and harmful surgical practices: other forms of violence on female genitalia besides FGM.

In the first weeks of August, End FGM EU Youth Ambassadors will arrive in Brussels to continue a very exciting project: the Purple Chair Podcast, funded with the support of Erasmus+, which gives a platform to anti-FGM activists and empowers young voices. They will begin recording their first episodes, so wish them luck - and stay tuned to listen!

The Join our CHAIN project is dedicated to the prevention and elimination of the harmful practices of female genital mutilation and early and forced marriage among affected communities in 3 EU countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland) through End FGM EU. In May, Join Our CHAIN saw one of its first brainstorming sessions that will kick off the planning stages of this project.

In June, The National Board of Health and Welfare in Sweden published a fact sheet on how many people may have been subjected to FGM, and we updated our interactive map to show the latest research results. Data-collection and country-wide studies are one of the most important steps towards addressing harmful practices in Europe and beyond.

AIDOS started the second phase of the Gender Transformative Approaches (GTAs) to Ending Female Genital Mutilation project, kicking off a series of activities. Together with UNFPA, they also launched the State of the World Population 2023 report.

In May, AkiDwA visited two schools and delivered presentations on FGM to a 160 boys and 120 girls. The organisation also recently launched the CHAIN project in Mallow, County Cork, Ireland. This launch was supported by the Cork Sexual Violence Centre and the Cork Sexual Assault Treatment Unit and attended by over 30 local migrant women.

GAMS Belgium launched a national awareness campaign to prevent female genital mutilation during summer holidays. The organisation  welcomed Halimata Fofana, an inspirational author who has just published her second novel “À l’ombre de la cite Rimbaud”, and organised a series of activities around it.

IFRAH, together with support from UNFPA Somalia, conducted a 2-day consultative meeting for 30 religious leaders in Mogadishu to promote Zero Tolerance on FGM and work actively with communities to change attitudes, raise awareness, and involve leaders in the movement for change.

The Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy is a major event, and the 2023 edition was an exceptional opportunity for Marie-Claire Kakpotia, CEO and Founder of Les Orchidées Rouges, to raise awareness about the urgency of tackling FGM.

The Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies is joining forces with multiple European partners on the "MARVOW 2.0" project, a multi-agency collaboration to protect older women affected by violence in the European Union.

The National FGM Centre has developed a free, accessible introductory e-Learning course on FGM, with 6 modules that include information, animations, quizzes and real life case studies to test your knowledge!

The Network against Female Genital Cutting Switzerland launches the French version of the E-learning tool for professionals, a free resource which provides information worth knowing on the topic of FGM and offers concrete recommendations for action.

This June, the Join our CHAIN project entered its fourth month. Each of the three organisations (Terre de Femmes, Germany; ActionAid Italy; AkiDwA, Ireland) were able to recruit eight community trainers and organised a kick-off meeting to get to know each other.

UNAF is organising activities within the project 'Addressing gender-based violence in an intersectional and intercultural approach', whose main objective is to guarantee and facilitate the access of all women under equal conditions to public services and resources to address gender-based violence.

Wadi continues to expand their #StopFGM Campaign. In May, Wadi hosted a conference inviting activists and NGOs from South and Central Iraq to meet with their Kurdish counterparts and address the need for a law banning FGM in all of Iraq.

Women of Grace UK is excited to announce two upcoming activities, including a workshop and a weekly session of meetings, as they continue their efforts of supporting women and girls at the community level and addressing the well-being of Survivors in a multidisciplinary manner.

AccessibleEU, to be launched in July by the European Disability Forum, is a new service from the European Commission to support the implementation of accessibility across the European Union. You can attend the launching event online or in-person, so stay tuned!

Men End FGM continue their work with communities in rural areas, addressing the importance of leaving harmful practices behind and protecting the rights of women and children. On the International Day of the African Child, they discuss the educational and digital accessibility gap, and introduce key points on the importance of access to resources and digital tools regardless of socioeconomic background.