Good evening, We welcome you to our weekly Twitter conference, I am Ojoro Rufus Olajide @ojorojustice and Co- anchoring with me today is Oladele Elijah @Oladeleesan

The topic we will be discussing today is “Diversifying the Campaign to endFGM using social media Platforms”.

The conference will last till 7.00pm and we will be taking questions from 6.30pm

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is defined by the World Health Organization as “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genitalia for non-medical reasons.

According to W.H.O. classification there are four types of FGM and these include;

Type I; partial or total removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce (Clitoridectomy)

Type II; partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora with or without excision if the labia majora

Type III; narrowing of the vaginal orifice with the creation of a covering seal by cutting and appositioning the labia minora and/or the labia majora, with or without the excision of the clitoris (Infibulation)

Type IV; All other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, for example; pricking, pulling, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization

FGM is a form of Child abuse and different laws has been set against it. The law against it varies from state to state in Nigeria.

For other information kindly visit our website www.endcuttinggirls.org , follow us on Instagram and twitter @endcuttinggirls and watch informative videos on our Youtube Channel youtube.com/endcuttinggirls

Social media can be defined as forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos).

Does your organization have a social media presence? If not, you’re not reaching anywhere near as many potential people as you could be

Did you know there’s over 86 million users of the internet in Nigeria and nearly 75% of online adults use social networking sites?.

Social media has become a key element in many people’s lives and is often where people turn when they have a question, comment or complaint with whatsoever vices they are facing.

It is also used by many as a means of communication, information, knowledge and source for daily news, ideas, statistics etc.

Using social media for campaigns is walking in the right direction.

According to statistics (https://bit.ly/2COh9Fj ) 84.3% of Nigerians are on Social media platform and Statistics has it that 93% of Nigeria will be using social by 2019.

It has been reported by (https://bit.ly/2NE7pqy) that the most commonly used social media platforms used by Nigerians are Whatsapp 41 %, Facebook 41 %, Instagram 25%, Youtube 25%, Twitter 13% and others.

Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted on Twitter, which corresponds to over 350,000 tweets sent per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year. (https://bit.ly/2xPbmOm).

From Twitter’s launch in 2006 and until 2009, the volume of tweets grew at increasingly high rates, approaching a 1,400% gain in daily volume year to year and around 1,000% gain in yearly volume.

On average, about 8202 tweets are sent every seconds across the world.

Statistics has it that about 1.47 billion people use facebook actively on daily basis.

According to a study titled ‘How Africa Tweets’ conducted by Portland communications in 2015. It shows Nigeria as the second largest geolocated tweets 360 million after Egypt with 500 million.  Given this result, it is safe to say that Nigeria has the second largest amount of users in Africa.

Leveraging on the presence of Social media platforms has turned out over time to be quite dynamic and as such doesn’t come with a sure guide to success….

But with this dynamism comes a uniform pattern that has been working to guarantee success both on Social media and on other platforms.

It requires consistency, facts, figures, statistics, dedication to the cause, resilience, good content creation and management and more. #endcuttingirls

So therefore, with these guides in mind, one can pursue a proper and well direct campaign on social media and this is inclusive of the campaign

It has been realized overtime of the unclear, uncertain and even ignorance of a lot of learned elite and adults in Nigeria and beyond even with the “widespread of the information age”

Therefore, to deliberately open the eyes of people to the myths, misconception and misinterpretation of the past understanding about FGM, Social media is playing a major role.

Also apart from the information portal and discussion, Social media is used for, it can also serve as a reporting stage for happenings in the local communities…….

As a lot of ground breaking activities taking place in the rural areas also helps to serve as a reference to urban and hype societies to influence the believe in supporting the movement

Occurrences of these sort can be found on our website www.endcuttinggirls.org as well as Social Media handles @endcuttinggirls

Another major influence that promotion of the campaign will have is the freedom of association, openness and support needed for survivors.

It has been realized that due to the fear of stigmatization and segregation, a lot of survivors do not have the boldness to speak out but rather bottle in the trauma, pain and feelings that could have helped to save other lives

Now with the use of the social media, a lot of survivors are being discovered everyday and it also allows even for anonymity so as to avoid stigmatization

Rather, it open doors for new beginnings, advocacy, association and support structure from other individuals and groups to .

As a matter of fact, a whole lot of women and young ladies not cut, feel so free to share their stories to debunk the myth of vices surrounding failure to cut the girl child due to the support of Social media

And they even get to match up and surpass the myths with much more disadvantages through the evidences of statistics provided and this only spreads the word more.

With these findings above we can see how important it is that we use social media to drive the endcuttinggirls campaign.

The @unicef_nigeria show how important social media is and one of the first online social media campaign was set up to .

Over the years campaign has reached so many people across the world through the use of social media in different countries

In the past 2 years of the #endcuttingirls campaign in Nigeria alone, the campaign has increased its reach to over 14,000 accounts in every fifteen (15) minutes of twitter conference.

We are leveraging on these platforms to reach out to people around the world and faster too.

Using social media to run campaigns is economical and faster thanks to the continues presence of an average Nigerian on facebook, Instagram or twitter.

Diversifying this campaign will end us reach more people within a limited time.

Now the question remains, how many people are we trying to reach daily with our individual, group and collective presence on Social media platforms in a bid to

With this we have come to the end of today’s conference a very big thank you to you for joining us on today’s conference, we’d like you to start sending your questions now and they’ll be promptly responded to.

Don’t forget to join us again for another episode of our weekly twitter conference next week Thursday, promises to be enlightening