In a region where women’s rights organisations fight daily against the triple burden of underfunding, shrinking civic space, and systemic marginalisation, appointments to international governance bodies rarely make headlines.
But the accession of the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) to the Rotating Presidency of the Advisory Council of the SEA-T programme (Society. Equality. Africa – The Transformation) is far more than a ceremonial honour. It is a structural shift in how the African feminist ecosystem is governed, resourced, and represented on the global stage.
For 2026, RFLD — a pan-African feminist hub founded in 2012, reaching over 2.9 million women and girls annually — assumes the leadership of one of the continent’s most strategically significant civil society advisory bodies.
What Is SEA-T? The Architecture of a Continental Programme
The SEA-T programme — Society. Equality. Africa – The Transformation — is a flagship initiative funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Launched in 2024 and running through 2028, SEA-T is designed not as a traditional top-down development programme but as an African civil-society-led transformation engine. Its mission is to strengthen feminist organisations, defend civic space, and advance gender equality across the continent — with African voices at the steering wheel.
At the heart of its governance structure is the Advisory Council: an eleven-member body composed of some of Africa’s most experienced and respected civil society organisations. The council’s mandate is to provide strategic oversight, validate programme orientations, ensure that community voices are integrated into decision-making, and hold implementing partners accountable to feminist principles.
Members include organisations such as :
- African Women’s Development Fund
- The Other Foundation
- UHAI-the East Africa Sexual Health and Rights Initiative
- Initiative Sankofa d’Afrique de l’Ouest
- Africans Rising For Unity, Justice, Peace & Dignity
- Initiative Pananetugri pour le Bien-être de la Femme
- Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement
- FEMNET, African Women’s Development and Communication Network
- Pollicy Data Institute
- Article 19 International Center Against Censorship
- Urgent Action Fund Africa
The council operates on a rotating presidency model, ensuring that no single organisation dominates its agenda and that leadership reflects the evolving priorities of the movement. For 2026, that rotating presidency has been entrusted to RFLD.
RFLD: More Than a Network — An Infrastructure
To understand why RFLD’s presidency matters, one must understand what RFLD actually is. Founded in 2012, RFLD has grown into what it now calls “the operating system that African feminism runs on” — a continental infrastructure of data, legal defence, sub-granting, digital safety, and feminist movement-building.
RFLD holds an Observer Status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) and is a member of the ACHPR’s Working Group of the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders. It is registered in Benin, Ghana, and Gambia, and is formally recognised by the African Union, the World Bank (as a strategic partner in gender strategy consultations).
Its network spans 450 member organisations and 8,965 individual members.
RFLD operates through seven strategic pillars: Health and Bodily Autonomy; Protection and Security; Economic and Climate Justice; Political Leadership; Governance and Media; Research and Data; and Institutional Strengthening and Sub-granting. These are not isolated programmatic silos — they are interlocking gears in a machine designed to produce systemic transformation.
RFLD Dònuèsè Data Center (rflgd.org/rfld-countries-data-center) is the only continental African infrastructure producing real-time, gender-disaggregated health data in 55 countries—maternal health, budget allocations, and service access rates. It directly addresses the gender-based malaria data gap that your foundation seeks to fill. Our tools also include:
- West Africa Legislative Platform → rflgd.org/west-africa-legislative-platform
- Legislative Database → rflgd.org/legislation-in-west-africa
- Digital Safety Compendium → rflgd.org/the-african-digital-safety-compendium
- Maternal Health Data → rflgd.org/maternal
- My Health, My Right (French-language SRHR) → rflgd.org/hub-donuese-ma-sante-mon-droit
- Gender-Responsive Budgeting → rflgd.org/ecojustice-in-africa
- Ending Malaria in West and Central Africa → https://rflgd.org/end-malaria-in-africa/
The Presidency: Mandate, Responsibilities, and Opportunity
As presiding organisation for 2026, RFLD takes on a set of responsibilities that go well beyond convening meetings. The rotating presidency of the SEA-T Advisory Council requires:
- Co-creating the strategic agenda for the council’s deliberations, ensuring that priorities reflect the full diversity of African feminist experience — including the Francophone majority that has been historically underrepresented;
- Facilitating inclusive deliberations, building consensus among eleven organisations with distinct geographic footprints, thematic focuses, and institutional cultures;
- Ensuring integration of council recommendations into SEA-T’s operational and financial decision-making, acting as the bridge between civil society guidance and programme implementation;
- Providing visible political leadership, representing the council externally at events the African Union summit cycle, and ECOWAS human rights forums.
- RFLD President Gloria AGUEH Dossi Sèkonnou described the significance of the appointment in terms that are both personal and structural: “For us, this presidency is not about institutional prestige. It is about the millions of women in Francophone Africa who have never had a seat at the table where decisions about their lives are made. We are here to hold that seat — and to make sure they never lose it again.”
- Professor Pascal Dohou, University Lecturer at the Université d’Abomey-Calavi and RFLD’s Regional Programme Director, added a scholarly dimension: “What we are witnessing is not simply an organisational appointment. It is the formal recognition that feminist infrastructure in Francophone Africa is no longer peripheral to the movement — it is central to it. RFLD has built the data, the networks, and the legitimacy to lead this council with rigour and with purpose. The SEA-T Advisory Council becomes a stronger body the moment it is led by an organisation that can speak for 29 Francophone nations while maintaining full institutional accountability.”
The context in which RFLD assumes this presidency is deeply unequal. According to RFLD’s own Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) Report 2025, a comprehensive analysis of civil society funding and safety across Sub-Saharan Africa, 94% of internationally funded gender-focused organisations in the region are Anglophone. Only 6% are Francophone. Among NGOs receiving international gender funding, the Francophone share is not merely smaller — it is structurally excluded by language barriers, reporting requirements in English, and philanthropic networks that cluster around Anglophone capitals: Nairobi, Accra, Johannesburg, Lagos.
This is not a marginal discrepancy. Francophone Africa — encompassing 29 countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Guinea, Cameroon, DRC, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Gabon, Madagascar, and others — is home to hundreds of millions of women who live under some of the continent’s most restrictive legal frameworks for gender rights. According to RFLD’s West Africa Legislative Platform and its Regional Francophone Hub 2025 Monitor, 54% of civic space in the Francophone region is contracting due to legislative changes. 66% of civil society organisations describe their operating environment as “unfavorable.” 51% of redress mechanisms fail to deliver justice when women report violations.
The barriers are not only legal. They are financial: only 3% of global gender-focused funding reaches West African Francophone organisations. They are digital: 69% of recorded incidents against human rights defenders in Francophone Africa involve virtual attacks — phishing, doxxing, hacking, online harassment. They are physical: 76% of women human rights defenders have received threats of physical violence; 83% have suffered online gender-based attacks; 91% report that threats have extended to their family members.
It is into this landscape that RFLD steps as council president — not as an outsider representing a distant movement, but as an organisation that has been working on the ground in these 29 countries, with 450 partner organisations, building the systems that keep defenders safe, movements funded, and data flowing to policymakers.
RFLD’s Five Priorities for the 2026 Presidency
RFLD has articulated a five-point agenda for its presidency year, designed to produce lasting structural change within the SEA-T programme and the broader feminist ecosystem:
1. Closing the Francophone Funding Gap. RFLD will use its presidency to formally document and present to international donors the $200 million annual funding gap that leaves Francophone feminist organisations chronically under-resourced. Through the council, RFLD will advocate for language-inclusive grantmaking criteria, bilingual reporting requirements for major foundations, and the establishment of dedicated Francophone windows in continental gender funds. Its own West Africa Francophone Feminist Fund (WAFFF) — which provides emergency grants of up to $5,000, capacity-building grants of up to $20,000, and advocacy grants of up to $30,000 — will serve as a proof-of-concept model for the broader philanthropic community.
2. Strengthening the Protection Architecture for Women Human Rights Defenders. The WHRDs crisis is acute. RFLD’s 2025 report documents over 3,500 women defenders under threat across the region. The presidency will advance a concrete proposal for a continental rapid-response legal fund, building on RFLD’s Digital Safety Compendium — which monitors legal frameworks and real-time threat data across 55 countries — and its existing partnerships with legal networks in 22 countries. The goal is to ensure that no defender faces judicial harassment, arbitrary detention, or digital violence without immediate, coordinated support.
3. Investing in Afrofeminist Data Generation. Power follows data. Organisations that cannot produce evidence cannot influence policy. RFLD’s Countries Data Center — the first open-access, gender-disaggregated human rights observatory in West Africa — already tracks indicators across 55 countries and has been cited by 12 governments in UN human rights reporting. The presidency will advocate for SEA-T’s support to scale this model, funding new policy briefs per year, expanding real-time GBV monitoring to 15 additional countries, and providing API access to 200+ local civil society organisations so they can build their own evidence-based advocacy.
4. Amplifying Intersectional and Marginalised Voices. The RFLD brings to the council a commitment to intersectionality that is grounded in practice, not theory. Its programs serve LGBTQI+ communities, rural women, women with disabilities, women in conflict zones, adolescent girls facing child marriage, and women in the informal economy. The presidency will advocate for disaggregated data reporting within SEA-T, ensuring that program outcomes are tracked by age, location, disability status, sexual orientation, and ethnicity — and that the most marginalised are not lost in aggregate numbers.
5. Co-Creating Collective Advocacy Tools. Eleven organisations on the advisory council represent eleven distinct movements. The presidency will invest in creating shared infrastructure: multilingual policy briefs that can be used by all member organisations, common advocacy positions on the Maputo Protocol implementation, coordinated campaigns on the AU’s 2063 Agenda, and a shared monitoring framework that tracks gender equality progress across the continent in a standardised, comparable way.
Looking Ahead: Deliverables by Year End
By the end of 2026, RFLD’s presidency is expected to produce:
- A Common Strategic Framework for the SEA-T Advisory Council covering 2027–2028, with Francophone priorities formally integrated;
- Concrete funding recommendations to the international donor community, backed by RFLD’s Maternal Health Platform data, WHRDs report findings, and regional monitor statistics;
- Collective advocacy positions on the Maputo Protocol, the AU Agenda 2063, and UN SDG 5;
- A Shared Governance Model for the council that other North-South cooperation programmes can replicate;
- Operational synergies between council member organisations — shared legal frameworks, joint campaigns, cross-border referral networks for defenders at risk.
In feminist movements, as in all movements, the question of who controls the infrastructure is ultimately a political question. Who controls the data? Who decides which organisations get funded? Who speaks at the UN? Who sits at the table when laws are being written?
For too long, the answers to those questions in Francophone Africa have pointed outward — to Anglophone capitals, to Geneva, to Washington, to London. RFLD’s assumption of the SEA-T Advisory Council presidency for 2026 is a small but structurally significant step in rewriting those answers. It is a signal — to funders, to governments, to defenders, and to the millions of women across 29 Francophone countries who have never seen themselves represented at the tables of power — that the infrastructure of African feminism is being built, and that they are building it themselves.“We are not asking to be included in the systems that have excluded us,” said Gloria AGUEH Dossi Sèkonnou. “We are building new systems — and this presidency is part of that construction.”
