A Kenyan expert pleaded with delegates at a US summit on female genital mutilation (FGM) on Friday not to waste any more time sending white men and consultants to Africa “to tell us how to stop this”.

“I am a village girl but I have a university education, I know my people, and how to reach them – we got this,” Domtila Chesang from West Pokot, told the high-level event in Washington DC, hosted by senate minority leader Harry Reid.

Speaking to the Guardian, Reid said his one regret in 34 years in Congress was that the most powerful country in the world “didn’t do more to tackle FGM”.

The Democrat senator said he was deeply disappointed in the progress that had been made. “Imagine living in a world where 200 million men had one of their testicles cut off – and were then stitched up and told to get on with their lives. Would we allow that to go on?”

Attending the event alongside more than 200 donors, policy makers and activists was outgoing US ambassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issues Cathy Russell. It is still not clear what President-elect Trump’s view will be on carrying on the Obama legacy of having a special roving ambassador post aimed at supporting the most vulnerable women around the world.

Friday’s event, the first ever FGM summit in the US, was funded by two small charitable foundations – the Wallace Fund and the Human Dignity Foundation, and hosted by Safe Hands for Girls and Equality Now.

Aimed at developing a “comprehensive blueprint” for US government agencies to use to fight FGM, the summit heard how the practice of mutilating the genitals of female children is much more widespread than previously thought.

Information is beginning to emerge of mutilation in previous unknown groups such as some sunni sects in Sri Lanka, one ethnic group in northern India and even accounts of mutilation among some Christian communities in the US until the 1940s.

Chesang has joined with several other prominent African anti-FGM campaigners to create the Big Sisters movement aimed at challenging the traditional NGO and funding structures which, they say, are failing in the fight against FGM.

“Is it because we are black, because we are African or because we are women that our organisations aren’t seen as worthy of the support from the big international donors?” said Jaha Dukureh, one of the founders of the Big Sisters movement.

The movement is aimed at drawing the international funding for FGM away from the international middle men and professional development businesses, channelling it directly to women working at the grassroots.



“I don’t need someone in London or Washington deciding how I am to do this job. It is us, the Big Sisters, leading and guiding their little sisters at the grassroots who will finish this,” said Dukureh.

‘I don’t need someone in London or Washington deciding how I am to do this job’ - Jaha Dukureh (right) Photograph: Nick Bradshaw

Also at the event was Renee Bergstrom, who underwent FGM in the US as a child. “It is very strange for me to be here at this summit – coming out here in public at this summit when I haven’t even be able to tell members of my own family about what happened to me for 50 years,” she said.

“But it feels very comfortable to be here with my African sisters. That’s why I did this. When a white American woman like me goes public and says I had genitals mutilated as a three-year-old in the US midwest, people pay attention – when it is a black child in Africa they don’t.”