The girl who walked over the mountain

When the girl discovered she was about to be circumcised, she went to KMG for support. Rachel Carter — Senior Programmes and Policy Manager for Africa — witnesses the scale and the success of KMG’s work.

I’ve just returned from a two-week trip to Ethiopia to visit WOMANKIND’s partner Kembatta Mentti Gezzima–Tope (women pooling their labour in Ethiopia). KMG is an Ethiopian non-governmental organisation founded in 1997.

Based in the Durame region — about 350km south of Addis Ababa — KMG’s range of work is astonishing: preventing Female Genital Mutilation and HIV and AIDS, girls’ education, legal advice, environmental projects, income generation, and a Mother and Child Health Centre, and much else.


I spent two days at projects in Shinshicho, one of the eleven woreda or districts in which KMG works. My first stop was at an awareness-raising meeting of 400 uncircumcised young girls. Older girls shared their fight and choice to remain uncircumcised ― and talked about the health problems associated with circumcision. The turnout was large, including boys and men ─ indicative of how KMG works to raise awareness of the choices families and girls do have to remain uncircumcised.

We also visited the newly opened Mother and Child Health Centre which is providing vital health care to the whole community with a particular focus on maternal care. As the local Government Hospital has no doctors on its staff at the moment, the two volunteer doctors at the MCHC are providing care — including major surgery such as caesarean sections and HIV and AIDS care — for the whole community.

On the second day we visited the Fugar community — artisans and potters who have traditionally been excluded and isolated by the rest of the community. Historically, women are the potters in this community and the work of KMG has focused specifically on their empowerment and independence. Through the work of KMG these communities have been given skills training, micro-credit loans and awareness-raising training on their rights so that they are now able to live more independently and equally.

Two weeks was hardly enough to even begin to understand the breadth and complexity of the work which KMG carries out within this region of Ethiopia and I am looking forward to returning in February to learn more. But the amazing achievements of the individual girls and women whom I met will stay with me. From the girl who ran away when she discovered she was about to be circumcised and walked over a mountain to ask KMG staff for support, to the women managing their pottery business. These women are really fighting for their rights — to a life free from violence, and to equality and autonomy.