Gambia

Aminata Manneh commonly known as Minah is a 3rd Year University of The Gambia student, a gender activist and also an intern at the American Corner, Banjul, has gone missing.

The last two months at WLUML have been a busy time! Two feminist leadership workshops took place in West Africa under the Women’s Empowerment and Leadership for Development and Democratisation (WELDD) programme. Banjul, on Gambia’s ‘smiling coast’ was the setting for the Anglophone Africa training, and the following month saw the Francophone Africa workshop take place in Dakar, Senegal.  

An unwavering commitment to ‘drop the knife’ in The Gambia

WHRDIC supports many women human rights defenders who fight for women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive rights, including the right to be free from female genital mutilation (FGM).

Despite being banned by the United Nations, this harmful practice continues to affect over 100 million women worldwide.

With almost four out of every five women in The Gambia experiencing FGM, it is a brave woman indeed who would campaign against such an established practice.

Dr. Isatou Touray, co-founder and executive director of Gambia Committee on Traditional Practices (GAMCOTRAP), is committed to ‘knife-dropping’, or ending the brutal custom of FGM in her country.

DAKAR - Human rights campaigners who have been struggling for years to eliminate female genital mutilation (FGM) in West Africa got a boost this week as news emerged that a group of Muslim clerics and scholars in Mauritania had declared a fatwa, or religious decree, against the practice.