When The Girl Generation set out across Isiolo, Narok, and Garissa counties, the brief wasn’t just to implement but find out what works to end FGM. Five years on, as the Africa-Led Movement to End FGM programme reaches its close in Kenya, the endline evaluations from Population Council and APHRC give us an answer, and it isn’t the same answer everywhere.
FGM prevalence in these three counties still dwarfs the national average of 15%; 66% in Isiolo, 51% in Narok, and a staggering 82.5% in Garissa. But prevalence was never going to be the whole story.
What the evaluations tracked instead was something harder to see: whether people who sat in our dialogues, our reflection circles, our champions’ sessions, actually came out the other side thinking, believing, and acting differently. Across all three counties, they did.
Isiolo: We pushed the door open
Isiolo started this programme with the most ground to cover, opposition to end FGM was comparatively low at baseline. By endline, the gap between people who had sat in our intergenerational dialogues and women’s reflection circles and those who had not was the widest.
- 79% of exposed participants were completely opposed to FGM, versus 64% of those unexposed.
- 67% said they were very unlikely to cut their daughters, versus 48% unexposed.
- Exposed participants were far more likely to call uncut girls “healthy” and marriageable, a direct rewrite of the meanings FGM has always borrowed its power from.
This is what catalysing change looks like. Isiolo also showed the strongest social diffusion of all three counties: 31% of exposed participants actively spread what they’d learned beyond their own households, and 56% more picked it up informally through radio, market talk, neighbours.
Narok: where the ground was already moving, we made sure it didn’t slide back
Narok tells a different story, and it’s just as important. Opposition here was already high before we arrived, which meant our job was not to convert; it was to consolidate. Couple/homestead dialogues, bringing men and women into the same room to negotiate their daughters’ futures together, did exactly that.
- 91% of exposed respondents were completely opposed to FGM, versus 87% unexposed.A smaller gap, but a meaningful one, especially given how close to ceiling these numbers already sit.
- Diffusion here ran through formal channels.Religious leaders and local administrators rather than the organic spread seen in Isiolo. Structured, but nonetheless change was observed.
Unlike Isiolo, the opposition was already strong, in Narok county with the only risk being a quiet regression. Narok’s endline suggests the programme held the line.
Garissa: knowledge moved fast. Deeper norms didn’t move at all.
Garissa provided the sharpest lesson in this endline evaluation. Exposure here was associated with real, measurable shifts:
- 3.5x the odds of holding an overall attitude opposed to FGM
- 4.79x the odds of reporting the agency to actually oppose it
- 3.91x more likely to have encouraged someone else to abandon the practice
- 70% less likely to intend FGM for their own daughters
That’s the movement working. But gender-inequality beliefs, the deeper architecture that FGM sits on top of, showed no meaningful shift at all. And the practice itself is adapting rather than disappearing: families shifting from “Pharaonic” cutting to “Sunna,” medicalisation framed as a safer compromise, cutting pushed to younger ages precisely because younger girls cannot yet refuse. As one girl champion in Garissa put it, plainly: “the older girls are more empowered and enough to say no… the baby has no consent.”
What actually worked in all counties
In all the counties we implemented, three things showed up every time:
- Trusted messengers move people; awareness alone does not. Survivors, male champions, former practitioners, and religious leaders willing to say something out loud in public gave everyone else permission to say it too.
- Give women a room of their own, and give couples a room together. Isiolo’s reflection circles and Narok’s couple dialogues worked because they matched the conversation to who actually needed to have it.
- Diffusion is not a bonus outcome, it’s the mechanism. The programme’s real reach was never the people in the room. It was when those people went home, to the markets and religious gatherings and talked to.
What’s next
Zero tolerance means naming every form of FGM as unacceptable. Sunna and medicalised versions included, not just the ones with the most visible harm. It means reaching the remote, insecure, pastoralist areas this phase could not fully access. And it means recognising that shifting what people say in a survey is the first movement, not the last one.
