RFLD operates on three interconnected levels.
- First, Individuals: women and girls, Vulnerable Groups, and people with disabilities, whom we train, protect, and support directly on the ground so they can claim their rights and take up leadership.
- Second, Network Organisations: our 670 member organisations and the small African organisations that lack management infrastructure, whom we support through three combined levers, the direct transfer of resources through our re-granting facility, the donation of a complete institutional management software suite worth approximately USD 5,000 per organisation, and the technical support that makes these systems sustainable.
- Third, the Ecosystem: policymakers, funders, researchers, and media actors, whom we reach through twelve open, free and bilingual public tools, and through our continental engagement work anchored in our Permanent Observer status with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
The success of RFLD’s model can be read at every level.
- The women we accompany are safer, better represented in decision-making spaces, and better protected against violence, female genital mutilation, child marriage, and climate shocks.
- The organisations of the network, reinforced by our Organizational Resilience Program in its first cohort of 500 structures, gain the capacity to manage larger grants, pass donor due diligence, mobilise multiple funding sources, and weather crises without collapsing.
- And the African feminist ecosystem as a whole now has open data, rigorous submissions carried before continental institutions, and solid infrastructure for the francophone corridor historically underserved by mainstream platforms.
Many African feminist organisations suffer from an institutional credibility deficit that has nothing to do with the quality of their work, and everything to do with the absence of systems that make their work visible to funders. RFLD placed the construction of robust systems at the heart of its strategy from the very first years. Without solid systems, no feminist advocacy lasts. Without feminist advocacy, solid systems are useless. RFLD understood this tension from the beginning and placed both within the same institutional gesture.
What more than ten years of leadership by Ms. Dossi Sekonnou AGUEH, Africa Director of the Network of Women Leaders for Development (RFLD), have left to the African feminist ecosystem
- A continental feminist network of RFLD legally registered in four sub-Saharan African countries, governed by African women, with continuous operational capacity.
- A continental voice carried before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, within the institutions of the African Union, at ECOWAS, at SADC, and at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York.
- A public infrastructure of feminist data that the movement can use free of charge, in the languages of the continent, hosted on the DƆNÙESÈ Data Center.
- A feminist fund that transfers resources directly to organisations.
- An organisational resilience programme that gives small organisations the management tools of the large ones.
- A feminist leadership school that has trained a generation of defenders, political candidates, community organisers, and civil society professionals.
- A documented Afro-feminist methodology available to any organisation that wishes to adopt it.
- A mature safeguarding and PSEAH practice.
- A way of conducting continental advocacy that articulates the local, national, regional, and continental levels without compromise at any tier.
- Permanent Observer Status with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, N° 553.
- Member of the Working Group of the African Commission on Human Rights Defenders.
- Mandate under ACHPR Resolution 628 LXXXII 2025 to anchor the continental study on legal frameworks for the protection of African persons forcibly displaced by climate change.
- 2026 Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee of the SEA-T Programme of GIZ and BMZ, selected among twelve African feminist organisations at the continental scale.
- Recognition by major institutional partners.
Three major workstreams are emerging for the 2026 to 2036 decade. First, the diversification of the funding model, to reduce dependence on a small number of donors and gain political independence. Second, continental expansion beyond the francophone corridor, to carry the RFLD model across the fifty-five member states of the African Union. Third, institutional transmission, so that RFLD’s second decade builds on what has been established.
Explore: https://rflgd.org/
On behalf of the entire RFLD team, on behalf of the six hundred and seventy member organisations of the network, on behalf of the thousands of women that your leadership has supported across the continent, thank you Dossi Gloria AGUEH. Thank you for the vision that never gave way. Thank you for the constancy that made all of this possible. Thank you for the intellectual generosity that shared knowledge instead of keeping it. Thank you for the institutional rigour that made the whole endeavour credible. Thank you for refusing the small politics of short-term efficiency and for building in the long term.
