There is a particular kind of silence that survivors of FGM know well. It is not the silence of peace. It is the silence of fear, of a wound you were told to carry quietly, to fold away like something unseemly, to never name in public. For years, that silence was expected of them. For years, most of them obeyed.
Then came Survivors Leadership Initiative
A group of survivors gathered for what we fondly refer to as the Survivor Leadership Initiative (SLI) under The Girl Generation-ALM. They came from Kenya, Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Senegal. Some had known each other for years. Some had watched each other become someone entirely different from the frightened, hesitant women who first walked into an SLI training room and struggled to say the word “FGM”out loud.
This last SLI reflection session wasn’t a goodbye. But it was, unmistakably, a reckoning with how far they had come, with how much had changed, and how much still needed to be done.
The Inception
When SLI began, it started as something modest but urgent: a response to survivors themselves saying they needed a space of their own. Not a panel. A space where they could breathe, grieve, heal, and then lead when they were ready.
The Survivor Leadership Training curriculum, first piloted in Kenya in 2022, was built around that need. It gave survivors practical tools: how to tell your story without retraumatising yourself, how to care for your own mental health while caring for others, how to walk into a room of policymakers and hold your ground. It built networks, peer support systems that turned individual women into a collective force.
The SLI cohort remains a living evidence of what investing in the leadership of survivors can produce.
Mumina Jirmo, now a community advocate with a network of over 150 women in her region, had once held her first Mother-Daughter Forum in a room where no one spoke for a full hour. FGM, she explained, was not something women spoke about. So she told her own story first. Then the women started to open up, and she realised the weight of what they had been holding. “I cannot be a voice for the voiceless,” she has said since. “What I can do is just pass the mic until all survivors can speak for themselves.”
That shift, from speaking for to speaking with, from being invited to genuinely leading, became the defining thread of every discusion around the survivor leadership Initiative.
The Room They Built
What made the final SLI Learning Forum different from so many gatherings on ending FGM was who ran it. Survivors led the majority of discussions. They set the agenda. They asked the hard questions amongst themselves, of the organisations that support them, and of the world that continues to demand their stories while sometimes resisting their authority.
Dr. Leyla Hussein, during her session, pressed the group on what the current global moment means for their work. With civic space shrinking, with funding for women’s rights being deprioritised, with anti-rights narratives gaining traction in political arenas that once felt stable; what does survivor leadership look like when the world seems to be moving backwards?
The answers were not simple, survivors reflected that the movement cannot afford to depend on invitation. Being asked to speak is not the same as being trusted to decide. Being included in a panel is not the same as shaping the policies that govern your own body and community. “Beyond invitation” was the phrase that echoed through the room.
The forum was also unflinching about language. Session Two asked a question that cut to the heart of how FGM is understood globally: what word or phrase most needs to change, and why? Survivors who have spent years watching their experience filtered through frameworks that call FGM a cultural issue, a health issue, a traditional practice rather than what it is: a human rights violation. Language, they argued, is not neutral. The words chosen to describe FGM either centre the rights of girls and women, or they make space for the harm to continue.
This is the same argument TGG-ALM’s Power of Language position paper has made, and which echoed through the UK FGM Summit earlier this year when it was cited in ministerial speeches and in global platforms like Women Deliver in Melbourne.
What Has Grown
The transformation documented across the SLI cohort from 2022 to 2026 is not a metaphor. It’s not only measurable but also deeply personal.
Women who could not say the word FGM in public now train others to speak about it. Women who were isolated in their pain now run networks, hold community dialogues, and advise governments. Women who were told their experience was private now stand at regional and global convenings and insist that their experience is not just data.
These are the pattern SLI has produced, again and again, across four countries and years of sustained investment in survivors. Women who were told their wounds disqualified them.
What Remains
The most significant moment of the SLI forum came from an unexpected direction. Ethiopia is developing its second-generation national roadmap to end FGM and child marriage, and it will intentionally incorporate survivor leadership principles. The process will draw directly on the tools, lessons, and frameworks developed through SLI.
And yet the forum was equally honest about what is unfinished. Ending FGM is not a short-term project. Cross-border FGM persists. Humanitarian crises displace communities and disrupt protection mechanisms. Funding for women’s rights is under threat. The social norms that sustain FGM do not dissolve with a single training or a single law.
Meaningful survivor leadership also still requires what the forum called institutional change, genuine power-sharing in programming and funding decisions and accountability structures. What the survivors themselves define. “Leadership requires resources, not just opportunities,”Qamar Kassim said, and the room held that plainly.
A Last Chapter That Opens a New One
As the programme draws to a close, the cohort of survivors who journeyed through the SLI framework, built on a foundation of training, peer support, digital storytelling, and advocacy, are now fully equipped and ready to lead.
But something was built here that does not close when a programme ends. Networks that support each other across borders. Skills that survivors carry with them. A different understanding, slowly taking hold in governments and communities, of who gets to lead the movement to end FGM.
The final SLI Reflection did not end with a farewell. It ended with commitment. A commitment from survivors themselves to keep going and to hold each other accountable.
Somewhere, right now, a woman who struggled to speak about what happened to her is running a forum where other women are slowly beginning to speak. She learned that from someone who learned it from SLI. That is how movements survive when programmes invest in them.
