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The Orchid ProjectThe Orchid Project has a simple vision: a world free from female genital mutilation (FGM). We work to raise awareness, gain support and ensure that there are more resources to allow us to end FGM by 2025 and help ensure that girls and women are able to reach their full potential. This campaign aims to break the silence and taboo around FGM, to point to the gaps and lack of information and data and to push for FGM to take the position it deserves, high on the priority list. Female genital mutilation is where a girl’s external genitals are cut, without her consent, without anaesthetic. It is a recognised abuse of human rights, child rights and women’s rights. However, despite the fact that it is recognised globally as such, 3 million girls a year continue to be cut in Africa alone along with countless others across Asia, the Middle East, and Diaspora communities in Western states. The UN estimates that up to 140 million women live today with the consequences – horrendous lifelong physical and psychological damage. It has devastating impacts on a girl’s health and on her development as well as wider social, community and economic consequences. Importantly, it happens because women lack empowerment and status. Tightly knit systems of control, of culture and of religion combine to ensure the practice continues. The Orchid Project asks for female genital mutilation to be ended within the next generation. It aims to: • raise global awareness Many organisations have worked for years to end FGM. The aim of The Orchid Project is not to duplicate this work, but to use it to raise further awareness and ensure that local voices are empowered to allow change to happen at the community level. It’s also vital that this issue is not left in the margins, but taken more mainstream, so that the social, community, economic and health impacts are more widely known. Why 2025? Because the world’s agencies, such as the United Nations have stated that their wish is to end FGM “within the next generation.” Unfortunately, there is no end-date or timescale for a generation. We think that there has to be an end in sight and will campaign accordingly. 15 years should be entirely achievable. To find out more information about the Orchid Project as well as what FGM is, why it is practiced and what its consequences are, please look at our website: End FGM Now
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