Tostan Community Empowerment Programme — Human-Rights Education & FGC Abandonment, Kolda Region

Tostan, a Senegalese NGO, runs a Community Empowerment Programme (CEP) combining non-formal education in human rights, women's health, hygiene and problem-solving, delivered through weekly classes over roughly three years and reinforced by 'social mobilisation' — organised diffusion of new norms across intermarried and inter-visiting villages. With funding from the GTZ Supra-Regional Project for the Elimination of Female Genital Cutting, the CEP expanded to 90 villages in Senegal's Kolda region in the late 1990s and 2000s, culminating in coordinated public declarations of abandonment of female genital cutting (FGC).
An evaluation by the Population Council's Frontiers in Reproductive Health Program (USAID-funded) used a pre/post comparison-group design across 20 CEP villages and 20 non-participating villages, surveying roughly 570 women and 370 men at baseline (December 2000) through endline (January 2003). Among CEP participants, approval of FGC fell from 72% to 16% (versus 89% to 60% in comparison villages), belief in FGC as a social necessity fell from 70% to 15%, and intent to cut daughters fell from 71% to 12%. The share of girls aged 5–10 who had not been cut rose from 21% to 49% among participants, compared with a smaller rise among non-participants in the same villages and no change in comparison villages — evidence that behaviour change, not just stated attitude, followed the education. The approach has since been adapted in eight African countries, and by 2019 an estimated 5.5 million people across roughly 8,830 communities had joined associated public declarations, though independent replication studies note that self-reported cutting is subject to social-desirability bias, and not all adopting countries have matched Senegal's comparison-group rigor.

Read the full analysis: https://tostan.org/evaluations-and-research/