Compass Media

Three days after Kenya recorded its first COVID-19 infection in mid-March, the government decided to close all schools. A few weeks later, Gumato's parents decided to have their daughter undergo female genital mutilation (FGM), which is prohibited in Kenya but still practised by some tribes including the Gabra, a nomadic camel-herding tribe that lives in a semi-arid region in northeast Kenya..

"We were happy that schools closed, because this gave us a better opportunity to circumcise our girls," Gumato's mother explains. "School holidays normally are a bit short for the girls to fully recover.”

She wanted her daughter to undergo FGM, because Gabra men only marry circumcised girls.
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Read our story 'School closures in Kenya lead to rise in FGM’ on  (link in bio)
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Text: .dijkstra
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Seventeen-year-old Anna had just started her final year of boarding school when coronavirus came to Kenya. 'In school we got sanitary towels and plenty of food. But since I got home, we struggled. My mother lost her job, there was no money, no food, no sanitary towels so I started looking for money,' she says. 'I met a 24-year-old boy in the streets who offered me some money for food and sanitary towels. Because he was so nice to me, we started to have s*x and after one month I found out I was pregnant. The boy doesn't want to support me and wanted me to do an (illegal) abortion. I feel terrible about my life and I'm afraid that I won't be able to finish my school because my mother is a single mum so she needs to work and cannot support me with the baby’
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Read our story 'School closures in Kenya lead to rise in FGM’ on  (link in bio)
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Text: .dijkstra
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To help some of the hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who have lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, the government is paying people to brave open sewers to clean up their neighbourhoods
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Link to our story on BBC in description
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                               .dijkstra