The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is backing a groundbreaking global media campaign led by the Guardian to revolutionise how female genital mutilation is reported and perceived across the world, with the aim of ending the practice.

Speaking at a key meeting with the heads of all of Kenya’s main media organisations at the UN headquarters in Nairobi, he announced five international FGM reporting grants – co-funded by the UNFPA, the UN’s population fund, and the Guardian – which will see key journalists in Kenya focus on FGM in an attempt to eradicate the harmful practice within a generation. Ban said he hoped the Kenyan model could act as a template that could be replicated across the continent.

“Not only do we hope to support the Kenyan media in bringing the issue of FGM to national and global attention, but we hope to create a media model that can be reproduced in other countries,” he said. “The mutilation of girls and women must stop in this generation – our generation.”

It is the first time an international news organisation has teamed with the UN and other leading news outlets to provide a coordinated response to a practice that affects more than 130 million girls and women around the world.

Ban also announced a reporting award that will be granted annually to an African reporter who has demonstrated innovation and commitment in covering FGM. The winner will spend two months training and working in the Guardian’s head offices in London.

The award is named after Efua Dorkenoo, who campaigned against FGM for 30 years before her death earlier this month, and headed the new Girl Generation campaign consortium.

Maggie O’Kane, coordinator of the Guardian’s EndFGM media campaign, said the launch of the global media campaign in Kenya was coming at a critical moment when the media, the law and government were all pushing in the same direction. “It really feels like things can happen here very, very fast now … people feel ready,” she said.

The launch of the Kenyan initiative marks a new chapter in the Guardian’s campaign, which has spanned three continents. After launching in February in the UK, where an estimated 20,000 girls are at risk of FGM, a petition from 17-year-old school girl Fahma Mohammed became one of the fastest growing in the history of campaigning website change.org.

Following support from the UN secretary general and teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, the petition secured a meeting with then education secretary, Michael Gove, who agreed to its key demand to write to all schools about the dangers of FGM.

Campaigner Jaha Dukureh successfully lobbied the Obama administration to carry out the first prevalence study since 1997 and create an action plan to tackle the issue in the US, where girls told the Guardian they had been taken back to their parents countries and subjected to “vacation cutting”.

Ban told the Nairobi audience of media moguls, UN officials and campaigners that the campaign had helped create “sustained public pressure [which] brought about concrete results”.

This month Dukureh took the campaign back to her home country of the Gambia, and with funding from the EndFGM consortium, The Girl Generation and the Guardian, hosted a youth summit that was front-page news in local media.

This year has been a critical one in the fight to eradicate FGM, with David Cameron and Barack Obama both speaking out against the practice, and promising policies to help bring an end to it for good. This month also saw the launch of The Girl Generation, the major Africa-led, UK-government-backed consortium that will focus its work on Africa, where most of the 29 countries that carry out FGM on girls are located.