This past 4-6 October, the UN Women Training Centre and the Ending Violence Against Women Section delivered a workshop on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting(FGM/C) to country level programmers and practitioners. The workshop aimed to leverage knowledge from and embed broader prevention approaches that address gender inequalities and violence against women and girls in tailoring programming approaches to addressing Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting.

This workshop took place within the framework of UN Women’s collaboration with the UNFPA-UNICEF Joint Programme on FGM/C to support strengthening the gender equality and women’s empowerment component of the programme at global, regional and country levels. As part of the collaboration, UN Women is coordinating the development of a Training Manual on Gender and FGM/C that will form part of the broader UNFPA/UNICEF Manual on Social Norms and Change.

The training addressed the following issues related to FGM/C:

• Using data to define gender and FGM/C: Comparing FGM/C with other development statistics
• Power and control: Defining patriarchy and patriarchal Systems: Discussing FGM/C as power and control Analyzing causes and continuation of FGM/C
• FGM/C as Violence Against Women and Girls: Defining FGM/C as VAWG, a harmful practice and a violation of human rights
• Change agents and sources of resistance: Using an Influence Matrix to analyze resistance and support
• Addressing harmful beliefs: Understanding and addressing myths and beliefs about FGM/C
• Gender transformative FGM/C programming

This pilot training served as a quality assurance mechanism to ensure standard of the training programme, which will be available as part of the UN Women Training Centre customized (on demand) courses in 2017.