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NAIROBI/RIYADH. — Kenya requires an innovative and community-sensitive strategy to accelerate the abandonment of the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a United Nations official said yesterday.Werner Schultink, the UN Children and Education Fund (UNICEF) Kenya Representative, said despite the law, most communities are still subjecting young girls secretly into the practice.

“We have to improve on collection of data and dissemination, enhance behaviour change and collaborate with religious leaders to enable us to end the vice by 2030 as planned,” Schultink said in a statement issued in Nairobi.

He said the country has made strides in recent years, and it requires intensive approaches to help reduce the number further. “We must shift approaches and listen to the voices of girls and young women as they are the ones that are directly affected,” Schultink noted.

According to the Kenya Demographic Health Survey (KDHS) 2014, the country’s national FGM prevalence rate dropped from 27 percent in 2009 to 21 percent.

The Cabinet Secretary for Public Service, Youth and Gender Affairs Sicily Kariuki attributed the success to enforcement of laws against FGM that has been greatly enhanced by the establishment of gender desks in police stations and the training of chosen policemen on gender issues.

Kariuki however reiterated that FGM is one of the severest forms of Gender Based Violence (GBV), hence the need to fight it to the end. “Communities that continue to practise the vice secretly through medicalisation or under cover of cultural and religious celebrations have to be enlightened to stop the practice,” she noted. Last year alone, 55 cutters in the country came out in the open to renounce the practice and burnt their paraphernalia. Young men have also come in the open to declare their willingness to marry uncut women.

In another development, about 11 000 Saudi women have received mobile phone repairing training to improve the employment chances of females, Al Riyadh local newspaper reported on Monday.

The free training was provided by the Technical and Vocational Training Cooperation to 10 769 female students studying at 19 collages in different part of the country.

The spokesperson of the cooperation, Fahad Al Otaibi, said that the training is part of a plan to localise jobs in the communication sector.

The cooperation also offers training on sales, consumer services and advanced repairing of smart phones. He said that the trained women are able to work at mobile phone shops after gaining the basic skills for such jobs, and they can also obtain licences to start their own businesses.

Saudi Arabia has been taking many steps to open new opportunities for recruiting women, including the distance work scheme that allows women to work from home.

Meanwhile, local news reported late last year that two ministries are negotiating the formation of women-only information technology firm to open up new sectors for female job-seekers. — Xinhua.