By Dossi Sekonnou Gloria Agueh – Africa Director, Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD)
March 2026
Every year, the global development community turns its eyes to Washington, D.C., for the release of the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) report. It is a ritual of accounting—a meticulous, country-by-country audit of whether women hold the same legal rights as men. For decades, this report has served as a benchmark for progress. But for Africa’s feminist advocates, reading the 2026 edition evokes a familiar, visceral reaction: a mixture of weary recognition and profound exhaustion.
We recognize the numbers because they confirm the reality we live every day. We are exhausted because, once again, the data reveals that a continent of extraordinary women is being systematically under-protected, under-resourced, and under-served by the very institutions designed to guarantee their rights.
However, the 2026 WBL report is different. It arrives with a sharper, more ambitious methodology that exposes the rot beneath the surface of “reform.” For the first time, the World Bank has moved beyond the simple question of “Does the law exist?” to ask two far more dangerous questions: “Are the systems in place to implement it?” and “Do experts believe it is actually enforced?”.
The answers for West Africa are devastating. They reveal a three-layered gap—between law, systems, and enforcement—that threatens to render decades of feminist advocacy meaningless.
The global headline is stark enough: women enjoy only two-thirds of the legal rights available to men, and not a single one of the 190 economies assessed grants full economic equality. But in West Africa, the situation is more acute. While some nations have Legal Framework scores approaching 80 out of 100, the systems needed to implement those laws—courts, agencies, data infrastructure—often score in the 20s or 30s.
This report, produced by the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD), analyzes the WBL 2026 data for the fifteen West African countries at the heart of our operations. It is not just an analysis of failure; it is a roadmap of where investment is missing. It is an indictment of a “ink vs. pencil” reality where rights are written in statute books but erased in daily life.
Across the fifteen West African nations RFLD monitors most intensively—Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo—a profound chasm separates legal text from lived reality.
When we drill into the data, we see a region operating at two speeds. On the surface, legislative reform is visible. Governments have signed treaties and passed bills. But beneath the surface, the machinery of justice is broken or entirely absent.
Consider Togo and Côte d’Ivoire. On paper, these nations appear to be regional leaders in gender equality.
Togo leads the group with a Legal Frameworks score of 79.33. This score suggests a progressive environment where women can work, travel, and own property freely.
Côte d’Ivoire follows closely with a Legal Frameworks score of 78.25.
However, the WBL 2026 data ruthlessly exposes the hollowness of these scores. When we look at the Supportive Frameworks index—which measures the existence of institutions, budgets, and administrative procedures—Togo’s score collapses to just 31.95. This represents a gap of nearly 48 points. Côte d’Ivoire shows an almost identical collapse, dropping to a Supportive Frameworks score of 32.92.
What does this mean in practice? It means that while a woman in Lomé or Abidjan may have the legal right to equal pay or protection from harassment, there is no labor inspectorate funded to investigate her claim, no specialized court to hear her case, and no support services to aid her recovery. The law is a dormant artifact, not a living shield.
If the “leaders” are failing on implementation, the situation in the region’s lagging economies is catastrophic. In these nations, women face a double burden: the absence of legal rights and the absence of protective systems.
Mauritania records the lowest Legal Frameworks score in the group at 33.50. Even more alarming, it is the only country in our focus group where the Safety legal score is a flat 0.00. This implies a complete legislative vacuum regarding domestic violence, sexual harassment, and femicide.
Niger is barely ahead, with a Legal score of 38.08 and a Supportive Frameworks score of just 19.18—the lowest in the entire cohort.
Guinea-Bissau presents perhaps the most jarring disconnect. Its Legal score is a modest 48.75, but its Supportive Frameworks score is 22.10, and its Enforcement Perception score—measuring whether experts believe laws are actually applied—is a devastating 21.25.
This data confirms that for millions of women in the Sahel and West Africa, the state is effectively absent from their lives as a guarantor of rights.
Table 1: The Architecture of Inequality (WBL 2026)
Scores for RFLD’s West Africa 15 Focus Countries
Country | Legal Frameworks (Laws) | Supportive Frameworks (Systems) | Enforcement Perceptions (Reality) |
Togo | 79.33 | 31.95 | 64.54 |
Côte d’Ivoire | 78.25 | 32.92 | 65.65 |
Sierra Leone | 71.88 | 43.13 | 51.03 |
Benin | 67.60 | 41.13 | 48.56 |
Burkina Faso | 67.40 | 44.20 | 46.91 |
Ghana | 66.72 | 50.93 | 50.46 |
Guinea | 61.88 | 36.33 | 46.88 |
Liberia | 58.95 | 28.43 | 37.37 |
The Gambia | 57.50 | 30.05 | 32.50 |
Senegal | 52.90 | 26.55 | 44.85 |
Nigeria | 51.10 | 49.00 | 34.33 |
Mali | 50.33 | 31.68 | 41.65 |
Guinea-Bissau | 48.75 | 22.10 | 21.25 |
Niger | 38.08 | 19.18 | 31.33 |
Mauritania | 33.50 | 31.45 | 36.48 |
This table is not merely a ranking of failure. It is a map of where investment in feminist infrastructure is most urgently needed—and most conspicuously absent.
To understand the human cost of these statistics, we must deconstruct the aggregate scores. Inside the WBL 2026 dataset lie five specific crises that define the daily struggle of West African women.
The Childcare Catastrophe: A Score of Zero
The single most alarming finding in the 2026 data is found in the Supportive Frameworks for Childcare. It is a finding so absolute it looks like a data error, yet it is the reality.
Every single one of the fifteen West African countries in our focus region scores zero (0.0) on Childcare Supportive Frameworks.
Benin: 0.
Ghana: 0.
Nigeria: 0.
Senegal: 0.
Togo: 0.
While the World Bank notes that globally, low-income economies have only 1% of necessary childcare mechanisms, West Africa is performing even below that dismal baseline. The institutional infrastructure for affordable, regulated, accessible childcare for children under three simply does not exist.
This is not a “social” issue; it is an economic emergency. Childcare is the pivot on which women’s economic participation turns. Without it, a woman cannot return to work after childbirth, cannot start a business, cannot attend training, and cannot run for political office.
Recent progress in Togo and Senegal (2023–2025) to enact childcare regulation frameworks represents a genuine legislative milestone. However, regulation without implementation machinery—without subsidized services, inspection capacity, or public provision—results in a Supportive Framework score of zero. The state has regulated the sector, but it has not built it.
Safety remains the lowest-performing topic globally. In West Africa, the data reveals a dangerous paradox between the creation of institutions and their usage.
Legally, the region is struggling. Mauritania scores 0.00 on Safety laws. Liberia, Niger, and Senegal score a negligible 6.25. This means that in vast swathes of West Africa, there is no meaningful legal protection against domestic violence, sexual harassment in public spaces, or femicide.
However, even where institutions do exist, they are failing.
Nigeria presents a striking case study. It achieves a Supportive Frameworks score of 100 for Safety, reflecting the establishment of specialized Sexual Offences Courts and survivor-centered police units in Lagos. Yet, its Enforcement Perception score for Safety is just 15.63.
Mali criminalized sexual harassment and recognized femicide in its 2024 penal code. Yet, its Safety Enforcement Perception is 0.00.
This gap tells us that while buildings may exist, trust does not. Legal experts and women on the ground know that these laws are not enforced. It is women like those RFLD serves—human rights defenders, journalists, and activists—who face this enforcement gap as a daily personal risk.
The narrative of the “African woman entrepreneur” is celebrated globally, but the legal reality stifles her growth. We see a paradox where countries like Togo, Benin, Ghana, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire score 75.0 on Legal Frameworks for Entrepreneurship. Formal legal recognition of a woman’s right to start a business exists.
But can she fund it? The data says no.
Guinea-Bissau scores 0.0 on both Legal and Supportive Frameworks for Entrepreneurship.
Niger scores just 25.0 on both.
Nigeria, the continent’s largest economy, scores only 40.0 on Entrepreneurship Supportive Frameworks.
The gap between “she can legally start a business” and “she can access a loan” remains vast. While Ghana introduced gender-responsive procurement provisions in 2023–2025 , such measures are toothless without the accompanying financial ecosystem: access to credit, market linkages, and business advisory services.
Pay equity highlights the “ink vs. pencil” problem most clearly.
Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Liberia all record perfect scores (100.0) on Pay Legal Frameworks.
On paper, equal pay is the law of the land.
In practice, the Supportive Frameworks for Pay collapse:
Togo: 0.0.
Liberia: 25.0.
Sierra Leone: 50.0.
Without pay transparency mechanisms, salary audits, or functioning equal pay complaints bodies, the legal guarantee of equal remuneration is a fiction.
Ownership of land is the foundation of wealth in West Africa. While Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Ghana show strong Legal scores (100.0) on Assets , Senegal lags significantly with a Legal score of just 25.0.
This low score reflects a reality RFLD has fought against for years: persistent gaps in formal land registration. RFLD-supported programs have helped over 10,000 women in Senegal receive land titles precisely because the formal legal system failed to deliver.
The Supportive Frameworks scores for Assets confirm the systemic failure:
The Gambia: 0.0.
Senegal, Nigeria, Mauritania: 12.5.
The institutions required to make inheritance rights and joint titling functional are barely operational.
The WBL 2026 report is a masterpiece of data collection, but it has a blind spot. It measures laws and systems, but it cannot measure the specific structural exclusion that RFLD has documented across the 29 Francophone African countries we serve.
There is an invisible wall that cuts Francophone women’s organizations out of the global feminist funding landscape: Language.
- Less than 3% of global gender-focused philanthropy reaches Francophone Africa.
The international funding architecture is dominated by English. Grant applications are in English. Reporting templates are in English. Global convenings are held in English. This creates a barrier that no amount of legal reform can dismantle. The civil society organizations (CSOs) that should be translating legal rights into reality—staffing safety centers, running childcare cooperatives, filing equal pay complaints—are chronically starved of resources simply because they operate in French.
This is the gap RFLD’s West Africa Francophone Feminist Fund (WAFFF) was created to fill. Since its launch, WAFFF has channeled rapid-response grants of $5,000 to $30,000 to feminist CSOs in Francophone countries—organizations that were previously invisible to the global ecosystem.
The WBL data tells us what is broken. But it is underfunded Francophone organizations that possess the how to fix it.
The urgency of this data is compounded by demographics. The WBL 2026 report warns that in the next decade, 1.2 billion young people will enter the global labor force, half of them female. Sub-Saharan Africa is the epicenter of this shift.
West Africa’s cities are expanding at a pace development institutions struggle to track. Young women are enrolling in schools, using technology, and demanding their rights with a clarity that terrifies the old guard.
However, the “demographic dividend” is not a guarantee. It is a potential outcome that can only be realized if these young women enter a labor force where:
The law protects them.
Childcare enables them to work.
Credit is accessible.
Enforcement is real.
The WBL 2026 data unambiguously declares that none of these conditions are met across West Africa today. If we do not build the infrastructure of equality now, we are not preparing for a dividend; we are preparing for a crisis of exclusion.
From Data to Infrastructure: RFLD’s Call to Action
Reading the WBL 2026 data through a West African feminist lens, three structural interventions emerge as non-negotiable.
Invest in Childcare as Economic Infrastructure
A score of zero across fifteen countries is not a gap; it is a policy failure of continental proportions.
The Demand: West African governments, backed by the World Bank and other partners, must treat childcare as core economic infrastructure, identical in priority to roads or electricity.
The Goal: We need regulated, subsidized, community-based childcare services. The World Bank’s own analysis shows that closing the gender gap in labor force participation could raise GDP by 15 to 20 percent.
Bridge the Safety Enforcement Gap
Legislating against femicide (as Mali did) is a first step, but it is hollow without enforcement.
The Solution: The missing link is feminist civil society. RFLD’s network of 450+ organizations includes the community health workers and legal aid providers who actually translate law into protection.
The Demand: These frontline defenders need sustained, multi-year funding to operationalize the safety laws that governments have merely written down.
Dismantle the Francophone Funding Wall
The correlation between language exclusion and the underdevelopment of feminist infrastructure is causal, not accidental.
The Demand: Donors and foundations must create dedicated funding streams in French, managed by intermediaries like RFLD who possess the cultural competence and fiduciary capacity to deploy capital effectively.
Infrastructure Is the Answer
The World Bank has done its job. The data is on the table. The WBL 2026 report acts as both a mirror and a map.
For RFLD, the path forward is clear. We do not need more awareness campaigns about the existence of rights. We need the infrastructure to enforce them.
RFLD was founded on the understanding that women’s rights require networks, data systems, funding channels, and legal support mechanisms.
The WBL 2026 report maps the terrain of inequality. Feminist organizations across West Africa have been building the roads to cross it. What is needed now—urgently and at scale—is the investment that turns those roads into a future for the 2.9 million women and girls in our network.
To the governments of West Africa: The childcare score of zero is a political choice. Reverse it. To philanthropic funders: The 3% funding rate for Francophone Africa is an indictment. Correct it.
The laws are written. It is time to build the systems that make them true.
About RFLD
RFLD holds observer status with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) and is a US 501(c)(3)-equivalent organization certified by NGOsource.
Contact: http://www.rflgd.org
References:
World Bank. 2026. Women, Business and the Law 2026: Benchmarking Laws for Jobs and Inclusive Growth. Washington, DC: World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-2196-7.
World Bank. 2026. WBL 2026 Economy Scores Dataset.
