For Fatou Baldeh, the past year was critical in the fight to end female genital mutilation. A survivor and the founder of the organization Women in Liberation & Leadership (WILL), Baldeh, 41, is a leading activist fighting against the practice in Gambia. Although FGM has been banned in her country since 2015, it still happens: about 75% of women and girls ages 15 to 49 have been cut, according to the United Nations Population Fund. FGM can lead to long-lasting health effects and is internationally recognized as a human-rights violation. Advocates say the law banning the practice is poorly enforced. “We continue to have those issues where we will have a case, we go to the police and report, and the police would be like, ‘This is our culture, this is our tradition.’ So they do not see it as a crime,” Baldeh says.
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This past year, Gambian parliamentarians considered a bill to overturn the ban. “This was an attack on women’s rights,” Baldeh says. She and WILL worked with other organizations to fight the bill. They connected with survivors, who shared their experiences with parliamentarians, and discussed the issue with religious leaders. They conducted a nationwide study to document the health impacts of FGM and brought that evidence to politicians. And they succeeded: in July 2024, Gambia’s parliament rejected the bill.
Baldeh says this past year has opened up the conversation: “People are talking about it, and that is a positive thing because we cannot end the practice if we don’t talk about it.” Baldeh says news of the bill has brought the issue of FGM back “in the limelight”—not just for Gambia, but for the rest of the world too. “It’s 2025, and little girls are being pinned down and their genitals are being cut in the name of culture and tradition,” she says. “When this whole issue happened in Gambia, it really made people pay attention.”
