Teachers, health professionals, regional health directors, civil society leaders and government representatives sat down at the same table for a sharing and exchange workshop on the Training and Orientation Modules for Teachers and Health Professionals on the Prevention and Management of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Senegal.
The workshop was convened by the Africa Coordination Centre for the Abandonment of FGM (ACCAF), in close collaboration with Options and Abass Ndao Hospital, under the coordination of the Directorate of Maternal and Child Health (DSME) at Senegal’s Ministry of Health and Public Hygiene. It brought together the TGG-ALM programme’s years of work with the realities of Senegal’s health and education systems, with one clear ambition: to give every actor in the country’s FGM response the same tools, the same evidence and the same language.
Why this workshop, and why now?
Senegal’s 1999 law against FGM and its 2022–2030 national strategy have built a strong foundation. Yet the workshop’s opening remarks named a persistent problem plainly: training and awareness efforts across the country have too often lacked harmonisation, leaving communities to navigate contradictory messages from one organisation to the next. As the Regional Director of Health for Kolda put it in his opening address on behalf of the country’s regional directorates, the moment called for a shared framework, “the same level of information, the same language and a unified approach for the field.”
The United Kingdom’s Embassy in Dakar, whose government has invested roughly 3.2 billion CFA francs in Senegal’s fight against FGM since 2022 through the FCDO, echoed that call for integration, describing the response to FGM as inseparable from building a stronger, more resilient health system overall.
Sharing what works
Participants moved through the full architecture of Senegal’s FGM response: the national strategy and its 2022–2026 action plan, TGG-ALM’s integration model and Survivor Leadership Initiative, the Girls’ Club approach, cross-border cooperation between Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, and the legal and human rights framework presented by the Association of Senegalese Women Lawyers. Abass Ndao Hospital shared its own experience of holistic FGM care, from its 2023 pilot to the international symposium it hosted in February 2026 alongside a reparative surgery campaign for 54 survivors.
The discussions that followed each session were candid. Participants raised the fragmentation of actors working in isolation, the absence of FGM from initial training curricula for nurses and midwives, gaps in data collection between community and facility level, and the stigma that still causes survivors to leave health facilities before receiving care. Answers were not abstract: a National Federation of CSOs and regional coalitions were pointed to as concrete structures for coordination, and the Ministry’s own Human Resources Directorate confirmed it is currently revising training curricula, an opening the workshop was designed to feed directly into.
For Sène Cory, TGG-ALM’s Regional Coordinator for Senegal, this convergence was the heart of the workshop’s value. “This is a good opportunity for us to improve the quality of the curriculum for midwives and nurses,” he said. “It has presented an opportunity to work on it.”
A call from the frontline
Among the health professionals in the room was Madame Louise Mendy, midwife and coordinator in charge at Abass Ndao Hospital, who used her intervention to push the conversation further. She called for future workshops of this kind to bring together an even more inclusive and diversified attendance, so that the full range of professionals who encounter FGM survivors are part of shaping the response.
“As a midwife, I would recommend more attention to psychological healthcare for survivors,” she said. Her point landed alongside a wider theme that ran through all three days: that surgical and medical repair, however necessary, is incomplete without sustained psychosocial support for the women and girls living with FGM’s after-effects.
What next
The workshop closed with a set of recommendations that stakeholders will now carry forward: harmonising data collection tools across the ministries of Health, Family, Justice and Education; integrating FGM modules into pre-service training curricula and community health worker packages; strengthening regional coalitions in Matam, Ziguinchor, Saint-Louis and Dakar; and advancing the decentralisation of reconstructive care beyond Dakar.
As TGG-ALM’s programme draws to a close, participants were candid about what must outlast it. The tools, training packages and relationships built over the convening now sit with Senegal’s own institutions. What was shared here was not a finished product, but a foundation for a national system to build on.
