Saturday, May 10, 2025
Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

By Anne Christine Poujoulat and Sabine COLPART

Head held high and smiling broadly, Adèle  walks proudly along the path to her workplace near Abidjan. At the age of 45, she’s a full-fledged woman again: she was circumcised as a teenager and has just had it repaired.
Adèle  is one of 28 Ivorian women who have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM) and were repaired in April at a public hospital in Treichville (south of Abidjan), during a mission by the Muskoka Fund, created in 2010 at the initiative of the French government following a G8 summit.
At the helm was obstetrician-surgeon Sarah Abramowicz, one of France’s leading authorities on female genital mending.
In the sweltering heat, the surgeon, her assistant and an anesthetist welcome Adèle , who has come with her younger sister and cousins. The French medical team will repair the patient’s clitoris and labia minora.
This mother of three boys aged 22, 16 and 12, who is going through a divorce, says she had “no real problems”, but was “embarrassed by the looks” of her partners.

“I feel my pleasure but it’s the way they look at me. They don’t say anything but you feel they’re not comfortable. And that makes you uncomfortable. When you look at other women, you’re totally different. That’s my problem. When I spread my legs, it’s all flat,” confides this midwife without taboo.

– Delicate surgery” –

“I’ve been trying to get it repaired for a long time, but we don’t know where to turn. It’s a delicate surgery, it has to be done right. So when we heard that white people were coming!” she says with a burst of laughter, all moved after the operation.
“I haven’t seen my results yet. But I’m proud to do it. I’m happy,” she repeats, sitting in a large room where a 31-year-old woman, who prefers not to give her name, is waiting her turn.
“I went all the way to Burkina Faso to get it fixed, but it wasn’t possible. I was cut at the age of 6 by a matron. It bothers me in my relationships and my husband left because of it”, confides the thirty-something, who says she paid 370,000 CFA francs (around 565 euros) for the repair in Burkina Faso, which didn’t happen.
One of the aims of this mission is to enable women to have their breasts repaired free of charge in hospitals. “That it’s not something accessible only to those who can afford it with private doctors”, stresses Stéphanie Nadal Gueye, coordinator at Fonds Muskoka.

– A “militant” choice –

To achieve this, the 60,000-euro mission included a major and unprecedented training component for hospital obstetricians.
Sarah Abramowicz trained 10 surgeons in her specialty from six French-speaking African countries (Guinea, Benin, Senegal, Chad, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire, the mission’s host country). But also seven paramedics, mainly midwives, to take “global” charge of the repair and offer psychosocial follow-up for the 28 patients – so that they are not stigmatized for having been repaired.
“We repair well when we repair as a whole,” explains Sarah Abramowicz, one of the only women repairers in France.
More than 230 million girls and women currently alive, around 6% of the world’s female population – 30 million more than in 2016 – have undergone female genital mutilation, internationally recognized as a human rights violation, according to a report published in March 2024 by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).
In Côte d’Ivoire, one woman in three is a victim of excision.

“What’s interesting about this mission is that we’ve planted seeds among the caregivers, but also among these women. They need to become spokespeople. There’s something militant about getting it fixed. That’s how the fight begins“, says Sarah Abramowicz, who receives ”10 photos a day of the evolution of their clitoris”, so happy and proud are her former patients.

Humaniterre with AFP