NAIROBI, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- Kenya's First lady Margaret Kenyatta on Monday advocated for alternative rites of passage to replace female genital mutilation (FGM).
Margaret said that FGM poses long-term health risks to young women and often leads to school dropout and early marriages, thus compromising the opportunities for social and economic advancement for the affected girls.
"The proposal to take girls through a 15-day initiation program consisting of sessions on mentorship into adulthood, healthy relationships, life skills training, basic home economics and the art of bead making is, indeed, welcome and the way forward," Margaret said in Nairobi.
The First Lady was speaking during the launch of the Johari Beads Bracelet initiative's Market Scope Study and Business Model, a program of the government and partners to promote the trade in beads in support of efforts to end FGM in the country by next year.
"The principal objective of this program is to empower women and girls from pastoral communities by supporting them to use their bead-making skills to earn an income while using the adornment from the beads to symbolize the transition to womanhood," she added.
United Nations Populations Fund Representative to Kenya Ademola Olajide praised the government's efforts towards ending women's repression.
"In the last few years, Kenya has been consistently initiating interventions to enhance the empowerment of women as well as protecting their well-being," Olajide said.
According to UNICEF, around 4 million women and girls in Kenya, or one in five, have been subjected to FGM. In some communities, this rises as high as 94 percent. Although overall these numbers have declined over recent years, they remain much too high.
In 2019, President Kenyatta made pledge to eliminate FGM in Kenya by 2022. Enditem
