Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, what funding from the public purse was provided to grassroots organisations working to eradicate FGM in their communities in each of the last five years.

We work with a range of organisations in our efforts to tackle Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). This includes specialist FGM charities, academic institutions, private sector organisations, and grassroots organisations.

The UK has a proud record of supporting the Africa-Led Movement to End FGM. We are investing £35 million between 2019-2027 to support grassroots African organisations and activists leading change from within their communities through small grant funding. The UK also supports grassroots organisations tackling FGM through the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women and the Equality Fund. We do not hold data on what proportion of FCDO spend has gone to grassroots organisations for activities that specifically address FGM.

In 2022, £75.1 million of UK bilateral Official Development Assistance was spent on tackling violence against women and girls. Results show that between April 2021 and March 2023 our work on gender-based violence, including FGM, reached 4.2 million people.

All FCDO programmes have agreed criteria for results and effectiveness against which they are measured annually. We have also developed new tools to track rates of FGM and changes in attitudes and are using these to measure the effectiveness of our FGM programmes.