'Keep Women Intact : The Eradication of Female Circumcision in the Ejagham communities in Southwest of Cameroon'.

The project started since 2001 with the goal of building a general consensus in community on the eradication of FGM. The community believes that FGM initiates the girls into womanhood, controls female sexuality, controls birth rate and conserves the monogamous status of the women. The programme involves sensitization meetings, workshops, community advocacy and mentoring. Without mention of human rights abuses, the civic education presents the female natural genital as best and the immediate and long-term results of cutting from the health point of view.

Coming from the Ejagham tribe, we are caught between the desire to enjoy what we have acquired as university graduates and the desire to improve on the lives of our less privileged mothers and sisters, who even in poverty could still afford to smile and laugh very loudly during our workshops and meetings. We have been to places we have never heard of, places not found in the local map of the area, places we could hardly believe existed on this surface of the earth. Places where a girl-child is wounded by the age of 3 years and given to marriage before she turns 12 year, like the case of Helen Offiom. Places we were looked upon as princesses from a different world, places we could not be offered even mere water as a sign of welcome.
Places where you are welcomed by mosquitoes and snakes that occupy the virgin forest along the rivers of Munaya and Cross River that runs across Nigeria. These are the sorts of places that ABEMO thought of, for our girls and women and decided to spend time, talking in the language we both can understand.
Our girls are turned between pleasures and pains. Women need healthy lives, education and happiness, not wounds and pains. They need to be themselves. ABEMO is committed to changing the cultural, social and emotional inequalities that characterise these communities. We were on target for 20 villages, but being in the area for over five years today, there seem to be more villages to work in.

After five years of community education and sensitisation on harmful effects and human rights abuses of FGM, surveillance data indicate that in 13 settlements in the region they are many circumcised young girls who are less than three years of age.