Although many organizations are working to fight FGM, activists say external pressures won’t prompt real change ; that has to come from within the community. In 2019, over a thousand Maasai people in the Loita Hills region of Kenya gathered to watch elders publicly announce the end of FGM — the first declaration from a community of this size in the country. "In the beginning, we did not think this was possible. But we joined hands together with cultural leaders, with the community, with girls, with their parents,” Sarah Tenoi, a Maasai woman and anti-FGM activist who works with the nonprofit SAFE Maa , told The Christian Science Monitor . “We cannot go alone. We must have someone to hold hands with and move together," she added.