RFLD has published the African Women’s Human Rights Report 2026, Volume I, a continental review of the state of women’s human rights across the fifty-five member states of the African Union. It is the second edition of the network’s annual human rights review.
The first edition, released in October 2025, covered sub-Saharan Africa. This year the scope extends to the whole continent, a change reflected in the new title, because the geography of non-accession to the Maputo Protocol cannot be explained without North Africa.
The report is organised in seven parts and forty-five chapters, supported by fourteen annexes that carry the working tools. It applies a single frame throughout, the implementation chain, which follows a right from accession to a treaty, through its domestication in national law, the budget allocated to give it effect, the record of enforcement, and finally the accountability owed to continental bodies. Every finding is graded against a four-tier evidence hierarchy, so that a reader can see where a claim rests on primary law and where it rests on reported testimony.
What the review establishes
Twenty-three years after the Maputo Protocol was adopted, forty-six of the fifty-five member states are party to it and nine remain outside. That count has not moved since 2023. The report’s central finding is that ratification and implementation have diverged, and that the movement working on women’s rights lacks a measure that changes when a state acts.
Reporting under Article 26, the obligation on states to account for what they have done, is identified as the weakest link. Compliance is low, and submissions are frequently overdue by several cycles. No public tracker of reporting exists from which the scale of the deficit could be read. A continental mechanism cannot assess implementation it has never been told about.
A report built to be used
Volume I is meant to be worked with. Its annexes carry a shadow reporting template for civil society submissions to the African Commission, written so that an organisation with no prior experience of the Commission can produce a usable submission. A proposed domestication index scores state action from public documents and can be updated each year by a single organisation. Alongside it sits an outline for a legal note on the accession route, addressed to the nine states still outside the Protocol, and a research agenda that names, obligation by obligation, the figures that have never been compiled. The final annex, a recommendations tracking matrix, sets out how each recommendation can be verified at the next cycle, so that the 2027 edition can report on movement rather than restate the demand.
About the report
RFLD is a pan-African feminist network holding Observer Status No. 553/2017 with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, with offices in Porto-Novo, Accra, Dakar and Banjul. The Dakar office opened in June 2026.
The report is available in English and French. It may be reproduced, cited and translated without charge, provided that RFLD is credited as publisher. Corrections to any data in the report are welcomed and will be published. Readers who identify an error are invited to write to admin@rflgd.org with the source that supports the correction.
The full report can be downloaded here:
