A Strategic Initiative by RFLD to Counter Escalating Threats Against Women Activists Across Africa
By the Women Leaders Network for Development – Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD)
Introduction: The Frontline Warriors Under Siege
In an era marked by democratic backsliding, shrinking civic space, and the weaponization of state machinery against dissent, Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) across Africa find themselves navigating an increasingly hostile landscape. These courageous individuals—activists, journalists, community organizers, and advocates—stand at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities. They face threats not only because of their activism but also because of their gender, experiencing a unique form of persecution that combines political repression with gender-based violence, social stigmatization, and systematic marginalization.
The Women Leaders Network for Development (RFLD), a pan-African feminist organization with observer status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), recognizes that the defense of human rights defenders is not merely a reactive service but a strategic imperative for sustaining democratic gains across the continent. With operations spanning all 55 African nations and a network reaching 2.9 million women and girls annually, RFLD is uniquely positioned to coordinate a continental response to the escalating risks faced by WHRDs.
On February 3rd, 2026, RFLD will convene a landmark Cross-Border WHRDs Protection Network Meeting at its Ghana office, bringing together 20 young women human rights defenders for a transformative two-hour session focused on building resilience, strengthening solidarity, and establishing sustainable protection mechanisms. This article examines the context necessitating such an intervention, the strategic framework guiding RFLD’s approach, and the anticipated outcomes of this critical gathering
The African continent is experiencing what scholars term “democratic backsliding”—a phenomenon where elected leaders systematically dismantle democratic institutions from within using the very instruments of law they are sworn to uphold. This “legalistic autocracy” is particularly insidious because it wears the cloak of legitimacy, making it harder to challenge than outright military coups.
Across West, Central, East, and Southern Africa, governments are introducing increasingly restrictive NGO laws, curbing freedom of speech, and using national security as a pretext to criminalize peaceful assembly. Anti-terrorism legislation and cybercrime bills, drafted with deliberately vague language, allow authorities to label legitimate dissent as “incitement to violence” or “destabilization of the state.” The result is a chilling effect on civic participation, with civil society organizations facing bureaucratic harassment, arbitrary asset freezing, and even outright bans on their operations.
For WHRDs, this environment is doubly hostile. Patriarchal authoritarianism views women’s independent political agency as a fundamental threat to the established social order. Consequently, attacks on civic space are often gendered—sexual violence is deployed as a tool of political control, “morality laws” are invoked to silence female activists, and character assassination campaigns target women’s reputations in ways that male activists rarely experience.
The Cross-Border Nature of Contemporary Threats
What distinguishes the current moment from previous periods of repression is the increasingly transnational character of the threats WHRDs face. Authoritarian regimes are learning from each other, sharing surveillance technologies, and coordinating across borders to silence dissent. The digital realm has erased geographic boundaries, meaning that an activist in Accra can be targeted by disinformation campaigns originating from state actors in another country, while a defender fleeing persecution in Bujumbura may find that their digital footprint has already been shared with authorities in their destination country.
Cross-border threats facing WHRDs include:
Digital Surveillance and Cyberattacks: State-sponsored use of spyware to monitor activists’ communications, infiltrate networks, and pre-emptively disrupt organizing efforts. The proliferation of commercial surveillance tools like Pegasus has democratized state repression, allowing even resource-constrained governments to deploy sophisticated digital tracking.
Coordinated Smear Campaigns: Disinformation networks that operate across multiple countries, deploying deepfakes, sexualized content, and character assassination to discredit women leaders. These campaigns are particularly effective in patriarchal societies where women’s moral standing is weaponized against them.
Legal Persecution Across Jurisdictions: Activists fleeing one country often find themselves subject to extradition requests, Interpol red notices, or informal pressure on host governments to revoke their asylum status or restrict their activities.
Economic Strangulation: Blocking access to international funding through “foreign agent” laws, freezing bank accounts, and preventing defenders from accessing the financial resources necessary to sustain their work.
Physical Violence and Assassination: While less common, targeted killings and forced disappearances remain the ultimate tool of intimidation, with perpetrators often acting with complete impunity due to weak judicial systems or state complicity.
Women human rights defenders face specific vulnerabilities that their male counterparts often do not encounter. Research documented in RFLD’s 2025 Sub-Saharan Africa WHRDs Report reveals that women activists are disproportionately subjected to sexual and gender-based violence as a form of political repression. This includes rape, forced marriage, intimate partner violence instigated by state actors, and public humiliation designed to shame women into silence.
Furthermore, the social costs of activism are higher for women. Traditional gender roles mean that women who engage in public advocacy are often accused of neglecting their families, being “bad mothers,” or violating cultural norms. This social stigma can result in community ostracization, divorce, and loss of child custody—consequences that serve as powerful deterrents to women’s continued activism.
The psychological toll is also distinct. Women activists report higher rates of burnout, trauma, and mental health challenges, partly because they receive less community support than male activists and partly because they face the additional burden of managing care responsibilities even while under threat.
RFLD’s intervention in WHRD protection is rooted in a decade of feminist organizing across Africa. Established in 2012 and holding observer status with the ACHPR since joining the Working Group on Human Rights Defenders, RFLD possesses both the institutional credibility and the grassroots reach necessary to coordinate continental protection efforts.With physical offices in Ghana, Benin, and Gambia, and programmatic presence across all 55 African countries, RFLD operates at multiple scales simultaneously—from providing emergency shelter to individual defenders at risk, to submitting shadow reports to regional human rights mechanisms, to managing the West Africa Francophone Feminist Fund (WAFFF) that channels resources to grassroots organizations.
This multi-scalar approach is essential because effective protection requires simultaneous interventions at the individual, organizational, and systemic levels. A safe house protects one defender today; a successful strategic litigation case protects thousands tomorrow by establishing legal precedent; advocacy that results in the repeal of restrictive laws protects entire movements for generations.
The Three Pillars of RFLD’s WHRD Protection Framework
RFLD’s comprehensive approach to WHRD protection rests on three interconnected pillars:
1. Emergency Response and Sanctuary
When a defender’s life is in immediate danger, speed is paramount. RFLD maintains a network of confidential safe houses across West and Central Africa, providing not just physical shelter but holistic recovery environments that include encrypted communication tools, medical care, trauma counseling, and temporary financial support. The organization operates a 72-hour maximum response time for emergency relocation requests, ensuring that at-risk defenders can be moved to safety before threats materialize into violence.
Beyond physical sanctuary, RFLD provides emergency legal representation for activists facing arbitrary arrest, bail support to prevent prolonged pre-trial detention, and advocacy with diplomatic missions when defenders require international protection.
2. Capacity Building and Preventive Protection
The most effective protection is prevention. RFLD invests heavily in building the capacity of WHRDs to assess risks, implement security protocols, and develop contingency plans before crises occur. This includes training on digital security best practices, physical security protocols, legal literacy regarding rights during arrest, and psychosocial resilience.
Recognizing that security cannot be individualized, RFLD also works to strengthen the collective protection capacity of women’s rights organizations, helping them develop internal security policies, establish rapid response networks, and create peer support systems.
3. Strategic Advocacy and Systemic Change
Individual protection, while urgent, is insufficient without addressing the structural causes of insecurity. RFLD engages in strategic litigation through national courts and regional bodies like the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, setting legal precedents that expand protective jurisprudence.
The organization also leverages its ACHPR observer status to submit shadow reports that challenge state narratives, collaborate with Special Rapporteurs to trigger urgent appeals, and participate in normative development processes that strengthen international human rights standards for WHRD protection.
Strategic Objectives
The Cross-Border WHRDs Protection Network Meeting scheduled for February 3rd, 2026, at RFLD’s Ghana office represents a tactical intervention designed to achieve multiple strategic objectives:
Building Regional Solidarity: In an environment where divide-and-conquer tactics are commonly deployed against civil society, creating horizontal connections between defenders across national boundaries builds collective strength. When authorities in one country attempt to isolate and intimidate a defender, a regional network can mobilize international pressure, provide safe haven, and maintain visibility of the case.
Practical Skills Transfer: Unlike academic conferences or high-level policy dialogues, this meeting prioritizes hands-on learning. Participants will leave with immediately applicable skills in digital security, emergency response protocols, and trauma-informed self-care—tools that can mean the difference between safety and harm.
Mapping the Protection Landscape: A comprehensive understanding of existing support mechanisms—from sympathetic lawyers and safe transit routes to friendly diplomatic missions and emergency funding sources—is essential for effective protection. This meeting will collectively map these resources, creating a shared knowledge base accessible to the entire network.
Establishing Rapid Response Mechanisms: The meeting will formalize communication protocols, establish secure channels for distress signals, and agree upon coordination mechanisms for cross-border support, effectively transforming a collection of individual defenders into a functional mutual aid network
Immediate Outcomes
The February 3rd meeting is expected to produce several immediate, tangible outcomes:
A Functional Cross-Border Network: Twenty WHRDs connected through secure communication channels with established protocols for mutual support.
Enhanced Individual Capacity: Each participant equipped with practical digital security skills, knowledge of legal protection mechanisms, and self-care strategies.
A Shared Resource Map: Comprehensive documentation of available support systems across the region, from safe houses and legal aid networks to sympathetic journalists and diplomatic contacts.
Emergency Response Protocols: Clear procedures for activating rapid response when a network member faces immediate threat.
Medium-Term Impact
Beyond the immediate outcomes, the network established on February 3rd serves as a foundation for longer-term impact:
Collective Documentation: Network members can collaborate to document patterns of repression, building evidence bases for strategic litigation and advocacy campaigns.
Peer Support Ecosystem: Reduced isolation and burnout through ongoing mutual support, mentorship relationships, and shared learning.
Regional Advocacy Coordination: Synchronized advocacy campaigns that leverage cross-border solidarity to amplify demands and increase pressure on perpetrators.
Institutional Memory: Preservation and transmission of protective knowledge across generations of activists, preventing the loss of hard-won lessons.
Systemic Change Vision
Ultimately, RFLD’s WHRD protection work aims not merely to help individual defenders survive but to create conditions where such extensive protection measures become unnecessary. This requires:
Legal Reform: Repeal of restrictive laws that criminalize legitimate activism, establishment of protective legislation specifically addressing violence against WHRDs, and implementation of effective accountability mechanisms for perpetrators.
Cultural Transformation: Shifting social norms that view women’s public leadership as transgressive, building recognition of WHRDs as community assets rather than threats, and dismantling the patriarchal structures that enable gendered violence.
Institutional Accountability: Ensuring that regional human rights mechanisms like the ACHPR and national judicial systems effectively investigate and prosecute attacks against defenders, ending the current climate of impunity
The Cross-Border WHRDs Protection Network Meeting represents far more than a training session or networking event. It is a deliberate act of resistance against forces that would silence women’s voices and extinguish the light of justice across Africa. In gathering these 20 young defenders, RFLD is not simply helping them survive—though survival is urgent and necessary—but investing in their capacity to thrive, to sustain their activism over the long term, and to build movements that can outlast any single individual.
The challenges are immense. The threats are real, sophisticated, and evolving. But so too is the resilience, creativity, and determination of Africa’s women human rights defenders. They have always been the backbone of liberation movements on this continent—from the anti-colonial struggles to the fight against apartheid to the ongoing battles for democracy and dignity today. They will not be silenced. They will not disappear.
RFLD’s commitment is to ensure that they do not have to fight alone. Through strategic protection, capacity building, regional solidarity, and relentless advocacy for systemic change, the organization is building an ecosystem where defenders are not just protected but empowered, where their work is not just tolerated but celebrated, and where the dream of a truly free and equal Africa moves from distant aspiration to lived reality.
The Cross-Border WHRDs Protection Network is one more thread in the fabric of this transformation—woven with care, reinforced with solidarity, and stretched across borders to catch those who might otherwise fall. It is the practical manifestation of RFLD’s founding belief: that women’s liberation is the liberation of Africa itself, and that defending the defenders is the most strategic investment we can make in the continent’s future.
As participants gather on February 3rd in RFLD’s Ghana office, they carry with them the hopes of millions—women and girls across 55 nations who are watching, learning, and preparing to take up the torch of activism. The network they build today will protect the movements of tomorrow. And in that work lies the promise of a continent finally freed from the chains of oppression, fully embodying the democratic and feminist principles that RFLD has spent over a decade championing.
The defenders will be defended. The silenced will be amplified. The isolated will be connected. And together, they will build the Africa we all deserve.
About RFLD
The Women Leaders Network for Development – Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) is a pan-African feminist organization with observer status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR). Established in 2012, RFLD operates across all 55 African countries with physical offices in Ghana, Benin, and Gambia. With 450 member organizations and 8,965 individual members, RFLD reaches 2.9 million women and girls annually through integrated programs in health, rights protection, economic empowerment, and political participation.
RFLD holds NGOsource Equivalency Determination certification as the legal equivalent of a U.S. public charity and serves as a Member of the ACHPR Working Group on Human Rights Defenders.
For more information:
- Website: https://rflgd.org
