How to fight female genital mutilation with economics – CNN

This activist showed me what ground-level investigation, hard-core determination and a lot of community conversation taught him about the practice of female genital mutilation: Follow the money.

Female genital mutilation is not an issue I ever thought about in economic terms. In pieces I wrote over the years about this practice of using (often unsterile) knives to remove in part or in total a girl’s external genitalia, people would talk with me about it as a cultural practice — one that girls and women in communities had begun to stand up to, but one that activists fighting the practice said only changed generationally.