Burkina Faso’s surprisingly successful effort to abandon female genital mutilation and cutting

Public administration scholarship has largely focused on institutional and other failures. As a result, we know quite a bit about how governance can and does go awry. But we know surprisingly little about how to get things right. One approach is to examine what exactly bureaucrats did when they got it right. This article focuses on a “least likely case”: Burkina Faso’s surprising success in bringing about large-scale female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) abandonment.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork – both qualitative and quantitative – this article explores compliance with anti-FGM/C law in Burkina Faso and neighboring Mali, and tests whether a change in FGM/C practice is associated with legal prohibition. The practice of FGM/C has historically been widespread in both countries, and neither is associated with significant coercive state capacity. Burkina Faso has chosen to try to reduce the practice of FGM/C using law, enacting, and implementing an anti-FGM/C law, while Mali has not. Given the above facts, including the limited coercive capacity of the state in Burkina Faso and the presence of significant political instability, we would not, in theory, expect Burkina to meet with much success in terms of fostering FGM/C abandonment. Burkina is simply not where one would typically expect to find an example of good public administration. Empirics sometimes defy theory, however, and we can learn from these cases.

This article briefly examines the literature on state capacity and compliance before turning to the methods used in order to examine effective public administration in Burkina Faso. It then describes the state’s efforts to reduce FGM/C incidence in Burkina Faso and which strategies appear to have been most effective.