Fattening rooms are a cultural practice popularly known in the Efik culture as something that prepares girls for marriage and coming of age. It's characterized by different things. One of the key things includes beauty of the skins where they use, ndom. Ndom is clay – white clay – that is used to beautify the skins. It encourages, you know, eating an enormous amount of food to add weight, to make you look bigger in a certain sense.

But it was also a way for young girls to learn how to cook, how to dance, how to make a good wife, make a good mother. They learned issues around pregnancy and childbirth within the same space, folktales and all that.

A big part of it was also the female genital mutilation, which is popularly known as female circumcision, where young girls had to go through the cutting of the clitoris or some parts of their labia majora or minora as a sense to ensure that they do not become promiscuous. This was done to ensure that women stayed in their homes and women did not go outside to look for, you know, sexual activity outside and all that.

So we recognised the fact that FGM had a lot of health implications, especially for women. This led to Cross River State having the law prohibiting girl child marriage and also prohibiting female circumcision. So over the years, we've been able to stop it.