CHANGE Plus aims at raising awareness, changing attitudes and promoting behaviour change towards the abandonment of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in practising African communities in four EU Member States (Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, France).

In order to achieve this objective, the project partners will jointly implement the following activities:

• Conducting participatory research, assessing communities and designing behaviour change activities in accordance with the research results
• Training 48 community members as CHANGE Agents, who will implement at least 144 behaviour change activities
• Training 8 experienced community members as CHANGE Champions, who will implement 48 activities, act as mentors for the CHANGE Agents and participate in various advocacy events on local, national and EU level
• Disseminating the project’s results to the public, national stakeholders, EU-stakeholders and decision makers

By realising our objectives, we expect CHANGE Plus to contribute to empowering community members to act as catalysts of behaviour change, to raising awareness on FGM, to reducing pressure on families to continue FGM and to integrating community voices into debates on FGM.

The project will also make a contribution to enhance partners’ and other NGOs knowledge on strategies to promote the abandonment of FGM in the EU. Public authorities, key professionals and stakeholders will receive advice on how to better prevent FGM.