Kenya has received a ray of hope in the fight against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a group of young girls known as The Restorers have recently developed an app called i-Cut which connects girls at risk of FGM with rescue agents and offers help to those who have already been cut.
The Technovation Challenge World Pitch Summit which was initiated in 2009, is a platform that gathers girls from around the world to come up with tech solutions to local community problems. Since its inception, 15,000 girls from more than 100 countries have participated in all the year editions of the past years.
i-Cut connects girls at risk of FGM with rescue agents and offers support for those who have already been cut. Although none of the girls have experienced FGM firsthand, the girls claimed that they have friends who have had the experience and it hurts to see them suffer.
Purity Achieng, one of the team members said “It’s still fresh in my mind, the scene of female genital mutilation,” One of my best friends was forced to drop out of school and into an early marriage at 15 after FGM, which greatly affected me, purity claimed.
In an address, the Chief Executive Officer Google Sundar Pichai told the girls, “I know the journey won’t always be easy but to the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur and who dream of creating amazing things, I want you to know that there’s a place for you in this industry, there’s a place for you at Google—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
