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Giant and Dwarf99 % of all women in the country still undergo female circumcision! And what about Egypt,a favourite destination for Slovaks, Czechs and many other European tourists? An unbelievable97 %! 190 This flies in the face of the fact that Egypt is one of the largest recipients ofdevelopment aid on the planet... Where are the human rights for women?The situation in some countries has improved as more and more countries in the Westfinally began conditioning additional aid to African countries with a stop to this brutalpractice. A very serious and unanswered question remains why they didn’t do so sooner.Even Slovak aid, no matter how small in comparison with the development aid providedby more generous and responsible countries, provides aid to countries that continue topractice FGM on a massive scale including the previously mentioned Sudan (South Sudansince 2011) where up to 91 % of women are mutilated and Kenya where 50 % of women aremutilated. 191 Both countries are official signatories to the Maputo Protocol by which thecountries in the African Union pledged to fight against this brutal practice in 2003. Sudansigned the Protocol in 2008 and Kenya made FGM illegal in September 2011. The only issueis that politicians signing an international agreement is one thing, actually introducing theobligations arising from it into practice is completely different. We in central Europe arewell aware of this issue.The question as to if the West should provide any form of development aid to thecountries that allow half of their populations to be mutilated or that do not take real andsignificant action against this practice is one of the most serious questions regardingdevelopment aid, and it is not alone in this distinction. One of the most widespread andlogical of these questions is why the wealthy world provides development aid to countriesthat are sadly notorious for their corruption. The answers are often complex but as a rulethey are derived from the basic fact that stopping development aid would threaten thelives and thousands and sometimes millions of innocent people, including women andchildren, who receive benefits from at least a portion of this aid. After all, reams of papercould be filled with stories as to how many billions of the aid provided by the EuropeanUnion to Slovakia, the Czech Republic and other new Member States has been siphonedoff through kickbacks and overpriced projects awarded to friends and sponsors of politicalparties. Estimates put such losses into double-digit percentages 192 and billions more flow190 More detailed information on this morbid topic can be found in the work Female Genital Mutilationcompiled by Comfort Momoh and published by British publisher Radcliffe Publishing Ltd.in 2005, which is available at: http://books.google.sk/books?id=dVjIP0RfVAMC&pg=PA6&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false. I cannot recommend it, however, for those with weaker stomachs.191 A detailed overview of FGM practices in individual countries can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_mutilation_by_country.192 Great Britain’s Ambassador to Slovakia, Mr Michael Roberts, touched on the subject of rampant corruptionin Slovakia, even before the “Gorilla” scandal broke. The interview was published in December2010 in the daily SME with the title of “20 per cent of every tender goes to bribes”. http://www.sme.sk/c/5692408/na-uplatky-ide-20-percent-z-kazdeho-tendra.html.214