The ABCs of SBC

SBC in Faith Engagement to End Harmful Practices

• UNICEF SBC • Season 2 • Episode 5

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For generations, harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage have been justified as traditions of identity and belonging, and have, at times, been linked to misinterpretations of religious text – even as they cause life long harm. Today, faith leaders across Africa and the Middle East are reshaping these beliefs from within their own communities, using their moral authority and influence to redefine these traditions and protect the next generation.

In this episode, Qali Id speaks with faith leaders and UNICEF specialists from Uganda, The Gambia, and Iraq to explore how faith engagement is helping end harmful practices, in particular FGM. From sermons that reinterpret religious teachings, to interfaith alliances confronting resistance, to tea-circle conversations that replace top-down campaigns, this discussion reveals how transformation takes root when it begins within communities themselves.

You’ll hear from:

  • Sheikh Abdallah Sabila, Imam and advocate from Uganda
  • Dr. Nassim Majidi, Director and Co-founder of Samuel Hall, Kenya
  • Momat Jallow, SBC Specialist at UNICEF The Gambia
  • Hadeer Albo Heae, SBC Manager at UNICEF Iraq

Resources:

The views and opinions expressed by the contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UNICEF or any entities they represent. The content here is for information purposes only.

The ABCs of SBC is hosted by Qali Id and produced and developed by Helena Ballester Bon in partnership with Common Thread.

Check out UNICEF’s latest publication on Social and Behaviour Change, Why don’t you just behave! For more information about UNICEF SBC, check out the programme guidance.

We care about what you think — you can share your thoughts on the podcast using this feedback form. For all other inquiries, please contact sbc@unicef.org.

I was attending a meeting in one of our hotels in our local town. One old man stood up and asked the question, which parted me. He said, who defines FGM as a bad culture?

 Mothers who have been circumcised, have produced a number of children. 10, 11, 12. And he said, despite the cutting they have been able to produce. Now he said, who says FGM is bad? Now that question changed , my whole thinking.

And I knew that something was still lacking. We needed to do a lot. The kind of question tells us that we have to change the approach of tackling this struggle or fight against FGM.

We want these people to define FGM has a bad culture in their homes, in their mosques, in the churches, in the communities, in the social centers where they meet. Let it come from them that this cultural practice is harmful, is bad. Once it comes from them, you can be sure that will be the beginning of the ending of this bad cultural practice in our community.

Female genital mutilation or FGM and child marriage are practices that to some are considered rites of passage essential to identity and belonging to others. As a result, these harmful practices still endure today in communities where they persist. Faith leaders are uniquely positioned to be powerful agents of change, and with the help of some new research, that's what we want to talk about today.

Welcome to the ABCs of SBC - a UNICEF podcast where we explore how social and behavior change can help us confront some of the most urgent and complex issues facing children today. I'm your host, Qali Id, and in this episode we're exploring how the engagement of faith leaders is supporting the end of harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage.

If you want to dive deeper into this issue, this episode coincides with the launch of a major new study by UNICEF and Samuel Hall. The study explores the role of faith engagement in ending harmful practices across regions with a focus on Ethiopia, Uganda, The Gambia, Somalia, and 13 other countries across Africa and Yemen.

It identified 10 obstacles that hinder effective faith engagement in ending harmful practices. You'll be able to find the link to this study in the show notes. To mark the release, we spoke with Dr. Nassim Majidi, director and founder of Samuel Hall, the research organization behind the study. I also had the honor of speaking to Sheikh Abdallah, an Imam and advocate from Uganda, who you heard at the beginning of this episode.

And finally, you'll also hear from Hadeer Albo Heae, SBC Manager for UNICEF Iraq, and Momat Jallow, Social and Behavior Change Specialist at UNICEF Gambia. The first question I've been wondering is why is engaging faith leaders so crucial to ending these practices? Here's Nassim Majidi and Imam Abdallah to start us off.

In our research, we wanted to understand how faith-based actors can be catalysts for change in these shifting settings and influence behavior in a positive way.

Faith actors are educators, they're influencers , they're advocates, and most importantly, they're trusted messengers.

Faith leaders in particular are key champions because they have the trust of communities. They can also reinterpret religious teachings or share messages through sermons and storytelling. So I would say, faith actors can shift norms in a way no external actor will ever be able to do.

These are not doctrinal issues. These are issues of culture, which can be handled. They are not anywhere mentioned in the Holy Books.

Even my Christian friends, the bishop tells me that it's not anyone mentioned in the Bible. Now the question is who is the right person then to tell them that this practice is bad? The right people to me are the religious leaders, the cultural institutions, because we are nearer to these people. They trust us and they listen to us easily. We interact with them on daily basis.

We're in them in all places. Whether we are celebrating happiness or we are grieving, we are together.

It's clear that faith leaders can be powerful allies in shifting social norms, but if they are resistant to change, progress will remain uneven. So what's holding things back? We ask Nassim to shed light on how the conversation is constantly evolving and why change isn't always straightforward.

We're seeing a lot of pushback. First, we see that there are new justifications for old practices. So for example, instead of openly defending FGM and child marriage as cultural religious imperatives, some resistance actors are adapting their arguments. For example, in Ethiopia and Somalia, we see that some groups now frame

Medicalized FGM, so FGM by doctors and clinics as a safer alternative, making it harder to challenge. But there's also some legal, some policy backlash. So even in countries where we've seen progress legally in terms of the frameworks to, to address these harmful practices, we equally see attempts to roll back those protections.

In The Gambia, for example some influential religious leaders in the country have led efforts to repeal the FGM ban, which the government have put in place, arguing that it is a religious obligation and we can't legalize this ban, we can't have a ban on FGM. And lastly, maybe the third example, which is , related to the urgency and why it is an important conversation now.

Is because of the digital resistance and misinformation we see widely on social media, a lot of the opposition to these progress on, on practices is moving online. So we are obviously in a digital time and we see many actors coming with. There are arguments on the online space using social media, using different websites to place misinformation on the topic.

So even with progress in policy and religious discourse, resistance continues to shift forcing programs to adapt in real time. Let's return to She Abdullah, to shed light on how far people will go to practice FGM and how difficult it is to shift the 2000 year old tradition.

We have been dealing with this for now over 20 years. Why hasn't it ended? It is becoming more complex. The actors are changing game styles all the time. They're using the porous borders, cross border FGM.. They're using the traditional birth attendance. The community is silent about it. They do it at night and in the bushes. It's difficult to end it. 

The people practicing our own relatives, we live with them. This culture has lasted over 2000 years for so long. It's a deeply rooted culture, which cannot end easily

FGM is still seen as a rite of passage for our girls into adulthood.

when we started this research, I didn't expect to find so much resistance, but also from such a diverse group. And obviously if you're looking to build a strategy for social and behavior change, a strategy against resistance, then that complexifies the work even more when you have such a diversity across the typology of actors.

As we've heard, the cultural, political and contextual forces protecting this practice are deeply complex and constantly evolving. That's the challenge and the call for nuanced layered and locally led responses. Let's hear from MoMA Jao in The Gambia and Naim from Samuel Hall about some of the common societal perceptions that fuel the pushback.

These religious leaders and some politicians and a cross section of the community think the reason is that it's a western led fight against our religion as well as also our culture. And the second reason could be also that there's a kind of a monetary affiliation to it.

The international agencies and some CSOs. Using FGM to gather funds and money that they can use personal.

Faith led advocacy, , is often dismissed as a foreign agenda, particularly when it's linked to international development initiatives. So resistance there to, to the advocacy is framed around cultural sovereignty, right? With more conservative leaders positioning harmful practices like FGM or child marriage as integral to their local identity and as something that needs to be protected, not questions.

Here, the messenger matters as much as the message. When initiatives aren't locally rooted, they're often dismissed as foreign interference, undermining their impact before they even begin. That's why community ownership is the cornerstone of effective SBC, and without it, people start to have questions.

Let's return to Sheikh Abdallah in Uganda. 

There was a mistake during the initial stages of the fight against the practice in my area because people came from outside the district and the local people saw them as coming to interfere with our culture.

Some people actually were hard questioning and saying, how many of us have gone to their places to interfere with their culture? Why are they interfering with ours? The saw it as interference of their lifestyle and not the fight to end a bad cultural practice.

This is a critical insight. Perceived interference undermines progress and trust. Building legitimacy means partnering with communities, not speaking for them. This was really brought home in The Gambia where there was a recent attempt to repeal the legal ban on FGM, although the ban was ultimately upheld.

The attempt was a star reminder of how fragile years of progress in ending this harmful practice remain. Momat tells us more 

A group of religious leaders and politicians wanted to repeal the FGM law in The Gambia . And this brought a lot of issues in The Gambia . And it was top on the development agenda of government of CSOs, international organizations, including UNICEF and UFPA and other embassies also.

One of the things that religious leaders pronouncing was the apart from expressing that this is a religious obligation and also a cultural thing that should continue, but emphasis was made on external influence.

So how should we respond? as Momat highlights here, we go local. 

The strategy that we employ to demystify the idea that they have that is Western influence is also to mobilize the CSOs to ensure that they have a kind of a very strong coordination mechanism. And in this coordination mechanism, we provided them with the key messages as well as also do a mapping to ensure that the different CSOs they work in areas Where they are trusted.

We need to continuously engage and hold under the three meetings and not in boardrooms or hotels. This campaign has to be indigenous and not from outsiders. It has to be from us who understand ourselves. We sit under a tricker, take a cup of tea, share a cup of water together as we're engaging the old men, as we're engaging the old women, as we're engaging the young ones

Over 3,700 kilometers away, Haddi explains how they face similar challenges with perceived external influence when it comes to aligning on child rights in Iraq.

I think this fear or perception around a global organization is something we've witnessed before we start our cooperation.

Like when we started our meeting and coordination. And we want to just to bring, the religious entities on board on what are the problems we are focusing on or we are encountering. And then. What child rights we want to focus and their first, the question was like what is the situation? You are, you're talking about what are the child rights you're referring to?

And they freely emphasized at the beginning. Like for example, this is our community, these are our norms. We are not gonna. Promote something that is beyond or outside of this community. But then when we sat with them and we told them what are the child rights, who are promoting, what are the problems we are encountering and we feel we need to focus on, it was something that was a hundred percent. What they felt as well. And I think that was the surprise that at the beginning there was this kind of fear or perception that there might be some differences, but towards the end it's everybody wants to reach the same goal. And that's how they supported us, for example, by designing the initiatives, by designing the toolkits bringing stories and holy verses from Koran, from Hadith, from different religious books that support the messages that we want to disseminate in the communities. we realized we were on the same page. 

This reveals something essential. Grounded conversations in familiar spaces under trees over tea can carry more weight than boardroom strategies and externally driven campaigns. This is SBC at its most authentic and embedded in culture, co-owned by community. But fear of international agendas and meddling was just one issue

nasim and colleagues found in their research .

The second core challenge we see is resistance and also divergent interpretations among faith leaders. Faith leaders are not one group. Some actively oppose harmful practices. Others resist change. Some just fear controversy and don't want to engage.

So for example, in Mali. Conservative religious associations have actually blocked the legislation banning FGM, claiming it is a religious obligation. But then in contrast reformist faith leaders will counter those arguments or some may struggle to counter those arguments because they're so entrenched in traditional interpretations.

There are examples of networks that are great at connecting values like dignity and protection directly to child protection goals. So this is the type of consistency in messaging that we want to see continue to shift some of the community-wide attitudes on harmful practices. Another really good example that's aligned with that are many examples of interfaith collaboration.

So when leaders from different faiths actually stand together in unity we see initiatives like those from the African Council of Religious Leaders, religions for Peace. They've done great work in creating interfaith networks including also women's faith networks.

So what we encourage in the study is to say. We need to strengthen the interfaith alliances to unify more of the messaging, to reduce the inconsistencies and have a common interpretation among faith leaders.

Faith leaders are not a monolith for faith engagement. To succeed, we need to build bridges across divergent beliefs and strengthen interfaith alliances with consistent messaging. This has already seen success in places like The Gambia and Uganda 

We saw that those who are against the repeal of the law were not very much organized. And with support from religious with peace, we managed to have a discussion with the two big religious council to form interfaith council, and that works very well for us.

And now we had a interfaith council and we are supporting them to build their capacity to understand what child rights is.

I want to appreciate the Interreligious Council of Uganda, which has brought all the religious institutions together to round table as one institution to discuss issues which affect us the same way.

The issues of health, issues of GBV harmful practice against women, and these are things we have discussed together as religious leaders On one table. We're not discussing spiritual issues, and there's no conflict about that. The Christian brothers, the Muslim brothers, the whatever brothers, all of us have agreed that this is a harmful practice.

And then we go back to engage our communities.

As we reflect, let's ask who's still missing from these conversations, including women, youth, and survivors isn't just a nod towards inclusivity, it's essential. These voices carry lived truth, but are sometimes left behind 

And key to us is to include the voices of women, of survivors, of youth, also of indigenous faith leaders. So some of these groups might often be excluded from decision making even though they have a key role to play. So formalizing their leadership roles will be important within faith-based networks.

Also creating platforms for survivors to share their experiences is incredibly important to ensure more inclusion. 

When we started working with the religious leaders of course the majority of the religious leaders, especially in Islam, and it, even within other religions in Iraq are male. So we didn't have a number of female voices to be present around the table.

Like for example, there was a specific woman from a specific well-known family that was very respected and that offered to do a follow-up gathering in her house where she would invite even more women and from this specific community and even from different religion religious and then, and they would sit in the house and they would speak about the problem and also speak about solution.

We moved beyond the religious bonding, but also to a bigger bonding. Like maybe they're all mothers or they're all encountering a specific problem and they also became a support group for each other. What is the issue? How can we support each other? It was also, it was, they were joking, was also a venting space, but I believe really it was a sort of a form of solution oriented gathering where they looked into how they want to help each other, overcome some of these issues.

As had shows shared identity, like motherhood can open powerful pathways for support and dialogue even across faith lines.

Child marriage and female genital mutilation are intersectional issues that don't just affect women, they affect children. let's hear from MoMA on how youth have been joining the conversation in The Gambia.

The young people have organized themself and they are going out for community outreach as well as also intergenerational dialogue with the adults as well as also using the media also to reach out to policy makers. And for example in The Gambia we have, the Children National Assembly that is supported by unicef and they frequently do a kind of intergenerational dialogue with policy makers. 

Young people through the National Youth Council are going out to do what we call banaba, which is a an open space discussion. Whereby they will go and discuss with the community around social norm and have practices, particularly child marriage and and FGM.

Let's turn now to another frontline in the struggle. Social media

I've seen many, messages or topics or of discussions within the social media related to FGM as well as also child marriage. Some of them are very horrible, some are misleading.

I think social media is becoming a very important platform to engage many people. And. Religious leaders who are working very hard to ensure that this ban was repealed.

Saw that opportunity and they, we are using the social media very well. And when we did our mapping, we ensure that other CSOs who are very keen in social media, we are supported technically also. To support other religious leaders to go into the , social media, and counter those misinformation that those religious leaders who are working to rebuild the ban we are doing.

Social media is essentially a megaphone. It gives an amplified voice to both sides. Religious leaders too have begun to harness these platforms in powerful ways, and as Naim explains, there are already some impressive success stories.

We've documented in this study shifts and some exciting shifts with media and technology. So the fact that faith actors are now using social media, they're using film, also digital campaigns to talk about taboo issues is also a force for positive change.

We seeing that there. Reaching young people more, they're creating more safe spaces for dialogue to spread awareness about why practices like FGM are harmful to challenge some of the long held misconceptions. So again, media can be used as a very positive force for a faith-based advocacy. And we're already seeing it and we're already seeing that it's working. 

We've covered a lot in this episode. Legal repeals, perceived external influence, evolving social norms, misinformation, cross-border cutting, and divergent interpretations. We've heard that overcoming challenges deeply rooted in communities and faiths is not easy, but faith engagement. An important SBC approach provides tools to make sure everyone feels heard and respected.

As we wrap up this episode, let's hear from Nasem on some concrete ways to leverage faith engagement in ending harmful practices.

There's a spread of issues and strategies that are emerging from our findings.

And so the guide that we've developed is designed to support SPC interventions across four stages. The first is about awareness and understanding. Creating the . Emotional mental space to hear something new often for the first time. What we've heard in our research is in some contexts, families said they had never heard a religious leader question FGM before.

So we need to open up some of these spaces for people to get more awareness and understanding and hear new messages. The second phase is about reflection, and so this reflection is nurtured through. Peer groups through study circles through join dialogues. One of our interviews, there was this great quote where someone said, we saw people starting to reflect not just on the practice, but on what their religion actually teaches.

So the reflection is really to come back to the root of it all.

So once we've opened the space for awareness and understanding and for reflection, then we turn to action.

And it's sometimes about the quiet, but courageous acts that are rooted again in spiritual conviction and in moral leadership. , There was a pastor in Nigeria who supported a survivor in church and who said our silence was causing harm. I had to break it. And so having this moment of action where faith leaders step in and begin the process of change in sermons in their messaging is incredibly important.

And fourth is then institutionalization. So how do we ensure that change is not just individual, it's not just in some settings, but actually becomes embedded in institutions and in practice. So for example, in Ethiopia, this is where we saw positive progress. For example, messages on ending f GM were integrated into religious parenting classes, but also into the curriculum of the youth ministry in Uganda. Similarly, one Interfaith Council created a standing committee on harmful practices. So this is, again, the four stages that we develop in our guide for SPC to support the way forward on a journey of change.

Awareness and understanding, reflection, action, and institutionalization. These four stages can provide a roadmap for this journey of change through faith engagement and SBC to shift harmful social norms, counter pushback against child rights, and make harmful practices like female genital mutilation and child marriage a thing of the past.

If you would like to hear about more of the topics we didn't have time to cover in today's episode, check out the new UNICEF Faith Engagement Guide on Harmful Practices developed in collaboration with Religions for Peace. And Samuel Hall linked in the show notes, it outlines 10 challenges in effective faith engagement to end harmful practices, including data capacity building, politicization of advocacy efforts, as well as further recommendations gleaned from their research.

Special thanks to Imam Abdallah, Nassim, Hadeer, and Momat for their time and expertise. And thanks to all of you for being one of thousands of listeners who have joined us on our own ABC's of SBC journey. If you've enjoyed today's episode. Check out our other episodes on social norms and harmful practices and preventing violence against girls, boys, and women.

Share this episode with your friends and colleagues and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Check back soon for our next episode where we'll be discussing SBC in community Systems strengthening. Until next time, I'm Qali Id.