Campaigning MEP Lady Nosheena Mobarik has praised the work of five young Kenyan women who developed an app to help girls affected by Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Baroness Mobarik, Conservative MEP for Scotland, was among a group welcoming the so-called Restorers to the European Parliament yesterday, and said: “These girls should be an inspiration to everyone who believes in getting practical help to victims of human rights abuse.
“They saw their fellow young Kenyans, innocent girls full of potential, having their bodies butchered and their futures tainted – and they decided to do something about it.”
Lady Mobarik was speaking after the Restorers – Synthia Otiento, Macrine Onyango, Purity Ouma, Stacy Owino and Ivy Akinyi – thanked her and other members of the Parliament’s European Conservatives and Reformists Group for nominating them for the 2019 Sakharov Prize for promoting human rights.
The i-Cut app, which the women developed as teenagers at high school, helps connect affected girls to legal and medical assistance and allows them to alert local authorities by pressing a panic button.
Lady Mobarik said: “FGM is pure child abuse wherever it happens. It has no religious, social, health or hygiene justification, and it is as cruel as it is pointless.
“Where it remains legal is must be banned, and where it is illegal the law must be applied with rigour.”
“These girls are heroines for doing what they did, standing up for their fellow females and doing so much to help them in a world where too few care for their plight.”
