AYV News February 1, 2023
Women’s Advocate, Dr. Sylvia Olayinka Blyden has made a public call for people to respect a girl’s right to say no to female circumcision.
She was giving a public lecture at the Auditorium of the University of Makeni, as a motivational speaker for the annual Girls Conference by COMMIT & ACT FOUNDATION (C.A.F.), with the theme: “Stop Underage & Forced Female Circumcision and Support the Girl Child Education”.
Using the theme as a backdrop, Dr. Blyden spoke on the topic of “Impact of Social Media (negative and positive) on the Girl Child” during which she intertwined the positive role of the Bondo Society in our communities in aspect of building up the self-esteem of girls.
She highly praised C.A.F. for taking admirable efforts in getting our Soweis to perform Bondo Society initiations but without any female circumcision of the girls so initiated.
Approximately, 1,000 teenage girls from several chiefdoms across Sierra Leone were in attendance at the auditorium as Dr. Blyden adequately explained her feelings about the Bondo Society – a society that she described to be “an African Sorority for African Women”.
