70 million girls face genital mutilation by 2030 - UNFPA

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February 7, 2018 11:38 AM

The UNFPA have predicted that 70 million girls will become victims of genital mutilation by 2030.

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, which marks the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) globally, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) warned that about 70 million girls face FGM between 2015 and 2030 across the world.

The new figures, according to a statement by the UNFPA in Abuja, project sthat the current estimates of 3.9 million girls mutilated each year will rise to 4.6 million by 2030. This calls for urgent and massive scale-up efforts to prevent that from happening, the organization said.

The UNFPA Executive Director, Natalia Kanem said, "The increase is due to projected population growth in communities that practice mutilation. More than 200 million women live with FGM today. The new figures show just how far we have to go to eliminate female genital mutilation."

"The good news is we know what works. Greater political will, community engagement, and targeted investments are changing social norms, practices, and lives. We need to quickly step up these efforts to make good on our collective pledge to end female genital mutilation by 2030."

The new numbers come from a more robust method to generate age-specific risk data for mutilations.

"The data were then combined with United Nations world population estimates to project overall risk. The new figures now also include data from Indonesia, where the revised method captured the approximately 1 million girls facing mutilation in their first year of life. Although the risk of a girl being mutilated is about one-third lower than it was three decades ago, more of them will face mutilation as girls' population increase," said Kanem.

UNFPA, along with UNICEF, leads the largest global programme to speed-up the elimination of FGM.

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