Bogaletch Gebre, who has died aged 65 or 66, was a scientist and activist whose charity, KMG Ethiopia, championed women’s rights and campaigned for the eradication of female genital mutilation (FGM) – of which she had been a victim herself – and bridal abduction.

KMG’s success was staggering: in the area in which it operated, the rate of FGM fell from nearly 100pc in 1999 to 3pc in 2008.

Bogaletch Gebre – who was known to all as “Boge” – was born into a farming family in 1953 at Zato, a village in the Kembatta district of southern Ethiopia. She was one of 14 children born to Gebre Kabre and his wife Lonseke Ayemo; most of her siblings died in childhood.

“Women were regarded as no better than the cows they milked,” she recalled. “My mother’s life was a nightmare. I don’t know how she survived. She was a very intelligent, very wise woman, but all her life she was abused and beaten – for nothing.”

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Boge grew up helping her mother, fetching water, cooking and doing general chores. Then, when she was about 12, she was held down by a man in the village, and while two women held her legs, a third took a razor blade to her genitals.

Boge nearly bled to death – the practice claimed the life of one of her sisters, who died, along with her baby, while attempting to give birth – but after her wounds had healed she resumed her household duties. Unlike most of her peers, however, when she went off for water she would hide the pitcher in the bushes and attend a missionary school for a few hours.

Her uncle helped by carrying out some of her household tasks, and by the time her father found out about her secret, she was able to read. She studied epidemiology and parasitology in Israel and won a Fulbright scholarship which took her to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and later UCLA. She saved money from her grants to send home.

In 1987, following a car crash, she was told that she would not walk again – but she went on to run five marathons. While still a student she founded her first charity, Development through Education, which raised $26,000 to provide technical books for high school pupils in her homeland. She was awarded a PhD in epidemiology at UCLA, but Ethiopia was riven by famine, poverty and political turbulence, and she returned home.

With $5,000 she had raised, she joined her sister Fikirte in founding KMG Ethiopia: “KMG” stands for “Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma”, or “Kembatti women standing together”. KGM went on to help build 10 rural bridges, enabling, among other benefits, more children to attend school; seven wells have been built and five natural springs enhanced; more than nine million indigenous trees have been planted on Hambaricho Mountain, and women suffering from HIV/Aids have been teamed up with Aids orphans.

KMG also took on contentious issues like bridal abductions, child marriage and domestic violence, and many local courts now have benches devoted to women’s cases.

Among many awards and honours, in 2005 Bogaletch Gebre was awarded a human rights prize by the European Council (alongside Bob Geldof), and in 2013 she was awarded the €150,000 Belgian King Baudouin Prize for her FGM activism.

Bogaletch Gebre, who died on November 2, 2019, did not marry and had no children.

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