Efua Dorkenoo, who has died aged 65 after undergoing treatment for cancer, was a tireless campaigner against female genital mutilation. She was widely regarded as the mother of the worldwide movement to end FGM. Efua fought for more than 30 years to ensure the protection of girls and women from a practice that violates their human rights.

She was born in Cape Coast, Ghana, daughter of John and Marian Elliot-Yorke. One of 11 children, she grew up on the campus of Adisadel college, Cape Coast, where her father was the school nurse, and went on to attend Wesley girls’ high school, where she eventually became a house prefect. At the age of 17, Efua moved to London, where she became a staff nurse at various hospitals including the Royal Free.

She was first exposed to FGM in the 1970s when she witnessed the agonies of a woman who had undergone infibulation, as she struggled to give birth. To Efua, FGM was the most inhumane practice she had ever seen, and the failure of doctors to help women who had undergone it, or even to acknowledge it, made them complicit in the suffering.

She began campaigning against the practice in the early 80s, while working for the charity Minority Rights Group. She went on to research FGM at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and gained a master’s degree in 1982. Under the auspices of the MRG, Efua published the first report on the subject in Britain. This helped her secure the necessary funds to set up the Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development (Forward), in 1983. It aimed to safeguard the sexual and reproductive health and rights of African women and girls, with a focus on the abolition of FGM. Within two years of the organisation’s arrival, and with Efua’s work acting as a catalyst, FGM was made illegal in Britain, with the passing of the Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act in 1985.

Her struggle was not without personal consequences. By taking on an age-old custom, she often provoked the wrath of traditionalists. Efua’s determination to end FGM, however, did not allow her to slow down. She often remarked that “there is no time to rest while children are being abused”.

For her work with Forward, Efua was appointed OBE in 1994. That was also the year in which her Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and Its Prevention was published. It was the first time any publication had explored FGM in such depth and the book is still considered an essential read. In 2002, it was selected by an international jury as one of Africa’s 100 best books of the 20th century.

Efua’s expertise in the field was sought by the World Health Organisation, where from 1995 until 2001 she was acting director of the department of women’s health. In that capacity, she co-ordinated regional action plans against FGM in six African countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan), helping to move the issue of FGM on to the agenda of ministries of health.

Throughout her work at the WHO, Efua struggled to ensure all member states banned FGM. Efua felt that misguided cultural sensitivities were delaying progress in its abolition, and so she promoted the framing of the practice as a human rights violation. At the WHO she succeeded, but the United Nations did not follow suit until 2012.

Efua grew impatient with the pace of progress, knowing that each year millions of girls around the world were subjected to the practice. She left the WHO for Equality Now, a pioneering women’s rights organisation that in 2000 awarded her a joint lifetime achievement award with Gloria Steinem for their contributions to international human rights. There, as the advocacy director of their global programme on FGM, Efua made sure that the voices of survivors were brought to the fore. She knew that no argument about cultural sensitivity would hold against the stories and determination of women who had undergone such terrible ordeals. She made sure that survivors came with her to every policy meeting and consultation event, and this, combined with strategic media advocacy work, resulted in a rapid build-up of political will.

In 2013, the British government announced funding to help end FGM in Africa and beyond within a generation. Efua became the programme director of what would become The Girl Generation: Together to End FGM, linking up the various organisations working to end the practice. The programme was launched a week before her death.

In 2012 Efua was made honorary senior research fellow in the School of Health Sciences at City University, London. In 2013, she was named one of BBC’s 100 Women.

She is survived by her husband, Freddie Green, by two sons, Kobina and Ebow, two stepsons, Galvin and Yanik, and a stepdaughter, Fummi, and by her grandson, Cassius.

• Efua Dorkenoo, campaigner, born 6 September 1949; died 18 October 2014