As we mark the 25th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) reflects on a quarter-century of progress, ongoing challenges, and the vital need to implement this landmark resolution across Africa. Adopted on October 31, 2000, UNSCR 1325 signified a fundamental shift in how the international community views conflict and peacebuilding, recognizing for the first time that women are not just victims of war but key drivers of sustainable peace. Nonetheless, the true measure of this resolution’s success lies not in its international recognition but in its adoption into national laws, policies, and everyday realities for women and girls across the continent. For Africa—a region facing complex security issues, from terrorism to ethnic conflict—the domestication of UNSCR 1325 is not just a legal requirement but an existential necessity for establishing lasting peace and security. From the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, and from the Great Lakes to Southern Africa, the need for women’s full participation in peace and security efforts has never been more critical.
The domestication of UNSCR 1325 involves turning international commitments into national action plans, laws, and institutions that truly empower women as key participants in peace. RFLD has seen both promising progress and notable gaps in this domestication process across Africa. While several countries—including Liberia, Uganda, Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Senegal—have created National Action Plans (NAPs) on Women, Peace, and Security, their implementation is often inconsistent, underfunded, and disconnected from the everyday realities women face amid insecurity. Genuine domestication requires more than just policy documents; it calls for constitutional changes to ensure women’s participation in peace processes, budget commitments to fund women-led peacebuilding efforts, security reforms that protect women rather than perpetuate violence, and judicial systems capable of delivering justice for conflict-related sexual violence. RFLD’s advocacy emphasizes that domestication must be comprehensive, well-funded, and accountable to women and communities, moving beyond symbolic actions to real changes in power structures that have historically kept women out of peace and security decision-making across Africa.
Understanding Africa’s peace and security landscape is vital for effectively implementing UNSCR 1325. The continent faces an unprecedented convergence of security threats that disproportionately affect women and girls, while also requiring their leadership in resolving these issues. Terrorism and violent extremism have spread across multiple regions, with groups like Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and ISIS affiliates using sexual violence as a weapon of war, abducting women and girls for forced marriage and recruitment, and destroying the social fabric of entire communities from Nigeria to Somalia, and from Mali to Mozambique. These extremist insurgencies flourish in fragile state contexts, where weak governance, corruption, and insufficient security responses create power vacuums that armed groups exploit. At the same time, inter-community and ethnic conflicts fueled by competition over increasingly scarce resources—such as land, water, and grazing areas—have intensified due to climate change impacts. This has created cycles of violence across pastoral regions of East Africa, agricultural zones of West Africa, and resource-rich areas of Central Africa, where women lose their livelihoods, face displacement, and bear the burden of safeguarding families while men engage in armed conflict. The proliferation of small arms, porous borders facilitating transnational criminal networks, and the intersection of organized crime with conflict economies further complicate this security landscape. These conditions create environments where women’s physical security, economic survival, and fundamental rights are constantly under threat across the continent.
The socio-economic dimensions of insecurity in Africa show why domestication of UNSCR 1325 must go beyond traditional security sector efforts to tackle the root causes of conflict. Poverty, unemployment, and deep inequalities create conditions of structural violence that make communities vulnerable to extremist recruitment, criminal exploitation, and conflict escalation. Women and girls, who make up most of the poor and face layered discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, religion, and other identities, experience these socio-economic vulnerabilities most intensely in urban slums and rural areas alike. When young people lack education and job opportunities, when communities cannot access basic services like healthcare and justice, and when corruption diverts resources from development to benefit elites, these grievances fuel conflict entrepreneurs and extremist ideologies. RFLD’s intersectional approach recognizes that lasting peace requires addressing these economic injustices alongside security measures. Domesticating UNSCR 1325 involves integrating women’s economic empowerment, access to land and productive resources, and participation in economic decision-making as key parts of national security strategies across African nations, understanding that economic justice and gender equality are not secondary issues but essential pillars of peace and stability that can change the continent’s security future.
RFLD’s comprehensive approach to integrating UNSCR 1325 starts with strengthening regional cooperation and aligning legal systems across Africa. Given the transnational nature of modern security threats—including terrorism networks operating across many countries and trafficking routes spanning the continent—coordinated regional responses that incorporate gender perspectives are essential. RFLD champions improved collaboration among African Union member states, regional economic communities like ECOWAS, EAC, SADC, IGAD, and ECCAS, as well as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, to create common standards for implementing UNSCR 1325. This involves harmonizing laws on conflict-related sexual violence across Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone, and Arabophone Africa, establishing regional mechanisms to protect Women Human Rights Defenders persecuted for peace efforts, developing cross-border early warning systems that include women’s security concerns, and ensuring that regional peace operations—whether African Union missions or regional forces—mandate active women’s participation. Domestic efforts at the national level must be supported by regional accountability mechanisms that track progress, exchange best practices between North African states implementing UNSCR 1325 and other regions, and offer mutual support. RFLD’s work at the continental level aims to build coalitions of women’s organizations that can collectively advocate for stronger domestication efforts, ensuring that women’s voices from diverse linguistic, cultural, and conflict backgrounds influence Africa’s peace and security frameworks.
Conflict prevention and early response mechanisms are vital areas where integrating UNSCR 1325 can lead to transformative results across Africa. Women in African communities possess invaluable early warning insights about emerging conflicts, with detailed knowledge of social dynamics, resource tensions, and warning signs that formal security systems often overlook. However, their perspectives are systematically excluded from official early warning and response mechanisms due to gender-blind institutional structures, whether in capital cities or rural districts. RFLD invests in community-based early warning systems that prioritize women’s knowledge, training women as peace monitors and mediators who can identify conflict triggers and foster dialogue before violence escalates—from market women who observe economic tensions to traditional women leaders who understand clan dynamics. Domesticating UNSCR 1325 requires African national governments to institutionalize women’s participation in early warning structures, from village peace committees to national security councils, ensuring that women’s insights inform prevention strategies. This also involves supporting indigenous peacebuilding methods led by women, including traditional conflict resolution practices developed across diverse African societies, inter-generational dialogues facilitated by women between youth and elders, and community reconciliation efforts where women serve as trusted mediators, drawing on cultural practices and social capital. RFLD documents and promotes these community-led initiatives across the continent, advocating for their inclusion in national peacebuilding frameworks and ensuring they receive adequate resources, recognition, and protection from those who might undermine women’s leadership in peacebuilding.
Women’s meaningful participation in formal peace processes remains one of the most visible yet elusive aspects of domestication of UNSCR 1325 across Africa. Despite 25 years since the resolution’s adoption, women are still significantly underrepresented in peace negotiations, ceasefire agreements, and post-conflict governance structures throughout the continent. Peace talks—whether addressing conflicts in South Sudan, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, or elsewhere—continue to be dominated by armed actors, overwhelmingly male, while women’s organizations, civil society representatives, and community leaders are often relegated to observer status or excluded altogether. This exclusion is not just a matter of fairness; research consistently shows that peace agreements with meaningful women’s participation are more comprehensive, more likely to address root causes of conflict, and notably more durable than agreements negotiated solely by armed parties—a pattern seen across African peace processes. RFLD’s advocacy for domesticating UNSCR 1325 calls for national governments and regional organizations like the African Union to establish binding quotas for women’s participation in peace delegations—not token representation, but at least 30% participation with meaningful influence over outcomes. Achieving this requires building women’s capacity as negotiators and mediators across Africa’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes, ensuring their safety during peace processes, and creating mechanisms for women from affected communities to shape negotiation agendas. RFLD conducts training programs to prepare women for peace leadership roles, supports women’s peace platforms to develop collective positions and recommendations, and works directly with peace processes across the continent to advocate for gender-responsive agreements that address conflict-related sexual violence, women’s security concerns, and their roles in post-conflict reconstruction and governance.
Protecting Women Human Rights Defenders and women peacebuilders is essential for implementing UNSCR 1325 in Africa’s complex security setting. Women advocating for peace, documenting human rights abuses, challenging patriarchal systems that sustain violence, and mobilizing communities for justice face increasing threats, harassment, intimidation, and violence from various actors—including state security, non-state armed groups, extremists, and community members resistant to gender equality. The shrinking civic space across much of Africa particularly endangers women activists, who encounter gender-specific attacks such as sexual violence, online harassment, smear campaigns targeting their character and morality, and legal persecution under repressive laws that governments across North and Southern Africa are increasingly applying against civil society. To effectively domesticize UNSCR 1325, African governments must establish and enforce strong protection frameworks for Women Human Rights Defenders, including legislation recognizing gender-based threats, rapid response systems to assist defenders in danger, investigations and prosecutions of attacks against women activists, and public endorsement from officials supporting women’s peace and human rights efforts. RFLD’s protection programs provide emergency assistance for defenders at risk, including temporary relocation, legal aid, psychosocial support, and digital security training. We also engage in strategic litigation at national and regional levels, utilizing mechanisms like the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to hold states accountable for inadequate protection of women defenders and to set legal standards that reinforce protection structures within the African Union.
Addressing conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence through comprehensive survivor-centered services and accountability mechanisms is key to integrating UNSCR 1325 across Africa. Sexual violence has been systematically weaponized during conflicts throughout the continent—from mass rapes in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Tigray to abductions and forced marriages by Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, and other extremist groups—yet survivors face significant obstacles in accessing justice, healthcare, and socio-economic support no matter the region. Impunity for perpetrators remains widespread across Africa, due to weak judicial systems, corruption, stigma against survivors, and limited investigation capacity, allowing most cases to go unprosecuted whether in post-conflict states or stable democracies. Domesticating UNSCR 1325 requires that national governments across Africa establish specialized courts or prosecutorial units for conflict-related sexual violence, train judges and lawyers in trauma-informed approaches, offer free legal aid to survivors, and ensure accountability for security sector actors who commit sexual violence, regardless of rank or political ties. Beyond justice, domestication also involves providing comprehensive support services, including immediate medical care for survivors, mental health and psychosocial support tailored to African cultural contexts, economic empowerment programs that help survivors rebuild livelihoods, and community reintegration initiatives that combat stigma. RFLD offers direct support to survivors in fragile settings across the continent, maintains a regional network of legal advocates specializing in sexual violence cases, and documents patterns of sexual violence to bolster both individual prosecutions and broader accountability efforts. We advocate for reparations programs that offer redress to survivors and for security sector reforms that prevent sexual violence by state actors within Africa’s diverse security institutions.
The transformation of security institutions through gender-responsive security sector reform is essential for integrating UNSCR 1325 across Africa. Throughout the continent, security forces—military, police, and intelligence agencies—remain largely male-dominated, often characterized by cultures of hypermasculinity that dismiss gender equality as irrelevant or even a threat to operational effectiveness. These institutions frequently engage in, or fail to prevent, violence against women, with reports of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers in African Union missions, police violence against women protesters in countries with democratic challenges, and military personnel committing sexual violence during various operations, from counter-insurgency efforts to routine deployments. Achieving the goals of UNSCR 1325 requires fundamentally transforming security institutions to mainstream gender perspectives into doctrines, training, recruitment, promotion, and operational procedures across Africa’s 55 nations. This involves recruiting and retaining women at all ranks, ensuring women make up not just token numbers but meaningful proportions capable of influencing institutional culture; implementing mandatory gender training for all security personnel on women’s rights, conflict-related sexual violence, and gender-related security issues; establishing codes of conduct with strong accountability measures for sexual exploitation and abuse; creating gender units or focal points within security agencies tasked with integrating gender perspectives; and ensuring security operations include gender analysis and safeguard women’s rights. RFLD collaborates with security institutions across Africa to promote these reforms, provides gender training to security personnel, and monitors sector conduct, documenting violations and advocating for accountability. It also highlights positive examples of gender-responsive security practices, such as Rwanda’s integrated security forces and innovative community policing models that prioritize women’s safety.
Ensuring consistent and adequate funding for women’s peace and security initiatives remains one of the biggest challenges in implementing UNSCR 1325 across Africa. Despite international commitments and national action plans in many African countries, funding for women-led peacebuilding organizations is severely insufficient, with women’s groups receiving less than one percent of bilateral aid to fragile and conflict-affected states on the continent. National budgets across Africa seldom allocate specific funds for implementing Women, Peace and Security commitments, treating them as aspirational goals rather than core security priorities that warrant funding comparable to military budgets. This funding gap means that women’s peacebuilding efforts run on limited budgets, preventing them from scaling successful strategies, creating sustainable jobs for women peace activists, or competing with well-funded government and international programs. To effectively domesticize UNSCR 1325, African countries need dedicated budget lines for Women, Peace and Security programs, clear transparency in expenditures, and mechanisms to ensure funds reach grassroots women’s groups instead of being absorbed by large international organizations or government institutions. RFLD addresses this funding shortfall through the West Africa Feminist Fund (WAFF) and promotes similar mechanisms in other African regions, providing flexible, multi-year grants to grassroots women’s organizations working on peace and security issues. We also work with African governments and international donors to increase and improve access to funding, support women’s organizations in building strong financial management and resource mobilization skills, and highlight the cost-effectiveness and impact of women-led peacebuilding efforts to advocate for more investment. Without adequate resources, domestication remains an empty promise across the continent, and RFLD’s work ensures that funding aligns with commitments.
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of UNSCR 1325, RFLD reaffirms that domestication is not a one-time legislative act but an ongoing process of transformation that requires sustained commitment, accountability, and the active leadership of women in affected communities across Africa. The challenges our continent faces—from terrorism and violent extremism to climate-induced resource conflicts and fragile states—cannot be solved by military solutions alone. Instead, they demand inclusive approaches that address root causes, bolster community resilience, and harness women’s knowledge and leadership—from Cairo to Cape Town, from Dakar to Dar es Salaam. True domestication of UNSCR 1325 means that every national security strategy in Africa includes women’s perspectives, every peace process involves women negotiators, security institutions uphold gender equality, survivors of conflict-related sexual violence gain access to justice and support, and women peacebuilders can operate without fear of persecution. RFLD urges governments across Africa to move beyond symbolic promises to meaningful implementation; international partners to provide resources and support for domestication efforts; the African Union and regional economic communities to enhance accountability; and communities to recognize and safeguard women peace leaders. Most importantly, we call on women and girls across Africa to claim their rightful roles as architects of peace, knowing that RFLD stands with you, supports your efforts, amplifies your voices, and fights alongside you for a feminist, just, and peaceful Africa—where safety, dignity, freedom, and full participation in decision-making are not just goals but everyday realities for all women across every region, nation, and community of our beloved continent.
