Sudan Anti FGM campaign

Name of the activity: Sudan Anti FGM campaign

Country/NMO: Sudan (MedSIN)

Program: Gender Based Violence

Contact information: [email protected]/ what’s No. : 00249907108008

Type of the activity: Campaign. Combination of education and advocacy. Campaigns create awareness in society about a certain topic (education aspect) and try to funnel this awareness into pressure on the decision makers to adapt policies accordingly (advocacy aspect).

General description:

It’s a national campaign aiming to fight FGM by raising awareness among urban and rural communities. This is done by trained medical students who approch women, men, high school students, doctors, midwives and other health care professional in their small communities. By targeting the health care cadre we achieve demedicalization of FGM in Sudan.

Focus area:

Female Genital Mutilation

Problem statement:

The prevalence of FGM in Sudan in girls within 15-19 age range is estimated at 85.5%, which is 6% less than the 35-39 age range which is 91.5% (MICS 2000).

This makes Sudan the 3rd country in the world with the highest prevalence of FGM. We have more than 5 states, where FGM rates are over 90%. That’s why we chose to advocate against it, because it’s a social norm deeply rooted in our community and people are not aware of it’s severe short and long term complications.

Target groups:

General population, Medical students, Healthcare Students, Other Students, Doctors, Other health professionals, Youth, Women, People with disabilities, Elderly people, Homeless people

Beneficiaries:

General population, Medical students, Healthcare Students, Doctors, Other health professionals, Children, Youth, Women

Objectives and indicators of success:

*Raising awareness regarding FGM in the rural areas with high prevalence. (We measured our progress by going to the state of North kordufan, which has the highest prevalence in last February to do our campaign, then we went again in October and people we advocated became advocators them selves).

*In 10 years MedSIN Sudan will reach all the states of Sudan to advocate it’s people and health care professionals about FGM. (In the past 5 years since 2015 we reached 7 states, and still we have 8 to go to).

*Raising awareness among the midwives since they are the ones who perform FGM in Sudan. ( We have 10 midwifery school all over Sudan, we reached 4 of them and all the 4 singed a statement to abolish FGM).

Methodology:

In the first 2 years we started with intensive capacity building for our members, So we had more than 8000 students across Sudan ready to advocate against FGM in their small communities.

In the following 3 years we focused on community outreach programmes to the rural areas with high prevalence. Also we targeted high school advocating girls, women’s and men’s gatherings, midwifery schools and other universities which are not medical across Sudan. And we will continue this raising awareness method for the next 5 years till we achieve our goal by reaching all the communities in Sudan.

Plans for evaluation:

In the past years we monitored and evaluated our campaign using structured questionnaires to measure the knowledge, attitude and practice in our targeted community before the begging of our campaign and after it by 5 to 6 month , so we could measure the impact.