Six fields.Four flagships.One African feminist architecture.
RFLD is the institutional shape African feminist organising has built for itself. It brings together the laws African women fought for, the communities African women hold, the resources our movements deserve, and the open knowledge our scholars demand: six integrated fields, 35+ African countries, 670 women-led organisations.
RFLD is a pan-African feminist network, born in francophone West Africa and organised across the continent. We refuse the colonial division that separates the law from the community, the data from the movement, and the resources from the women whose labour produces the freedoms we measure. We hold four functions together that most institutions keep apart: public policy infrastructure, grassroots re-granting, open knowledge tools, and direct community organising.
The integration is the politics. The DƆNÙESÈ Data Center, its name held in the Fon language of our founding community, produces the evidence African scholars and African journalists ask for. That evidence feeds our continental policy hubs, which feed our programmes, which feed the WAFFF Fund, which moves resources to 670 women-led member organisations. They do not implement the policy; they are the policy.
Born in 2013 and rooted across Senegal, Ghana, Benin and The Gambia, RFLD carries the institutional credentials the African feminist movement needs in the rooms where decisions about African women are still made without us: ACHPR Observer Status, the NGOsource 501(c)(3) Equivalency Determination, and African civil society co-chairship of the GIZ/BMZ SEA-T Council in 2026. The credentials are not the work. The work is the work.
Policy Infrastructure
Continental policy hubs co-produced with African feminist scholars and grassroots constituencies: Maputo Protocol · ACDEG · AU Mechanisms · West Africa Legislative Platform · Francophone Human Rights MOOC.
Grassroots Re-granting
Money moved to the women doing the work: WAFFF Fund · Africa Grant Portfolio · urgent-response support for African women defenders at moments of acute risk.
Open-Data Movement tools
African feminist knowledge as a public good: DƆNÙESÈ Data Center · African Digital Safety Compendium · Maternal Health · Gender-Responsive Budgeting · Climate Action Platform. Open, citable, trilingual.
Direct Programmes
Community organising at the continental scale: PAWELE · BRAVE · Climate Justice · Health in Francophone Africa · Ending FGM and Child Marriage.
The continent is moving fast.
The conditions African women organise within shift every year: colonial extraction, climate disruption, fundamentalisms old and new, capital flight, the politics of borders. Our work moves with the conditions because the women we organise with do.
Where patriarchal violence concentrates, and where we organise
Patriarchal violence against African women and girls is the daily ground on which African feminist organising stands. Gender-based violence, child marriage, the deliberate underfunding of African women's health, the criminalisation of African girls' education in too many places. BRAVE, our work to end FGM and child marriage, and the Maternal Health Data tools are how we refuse those realities at continental scale.
A continent in the hands of young African women
More than 60 per cent of the African continent is under 25. Young African women are the current organisers, theorists and street-level strategists of African feminism. PAWELE is built to carry the African women's political lineage forward across generations; our intergenerational governance keeps young African feminists at the table where their work is decided.
African women in motion, and the defenders who follow them
African women move, pushed by conflict, climate disruption, and economic structures they did not design. African women migrants, refugees and internally displaced sisters carry the deepest exposure. The Defender Security Movement toolkit and our urgent-response work follow the women whom borders, smugglers and patriarchal violence put at risk.
Where African law meets African community, and African data meets African organising.
SRHR · DSSR
Bodily autonomy as African feminist movement work. Sexual and reproductive lives defended by African women organising for African women: Maputo Protocol Articles 2, 4, 5 and 14 carried into community reality. No African woman asks permission for her own body.
Civic Space
Refusing the shrinkage of African civic space: on the street, in the courtroom, online. African women defenders organise everywhere African states would rather they did not, and we organise alongside them.
Defending African Women Defenders · Peace & Security
The defence of the African woman defender is the defence of African civil society. Relocation, legal accompaniment, encrypted communications, the sisterhood of urgent response, and the continental Women, Peace and Security work that names African women as architects of the peace they survived to build.
African Economic & Climate Justice
African women hold the soil, the seeds, the markets and the care. The economic and climate justice we organise begins from that fact: gender-responsive African budgets, the land rights of African women farmers, the climate adaptation African women are already leading.
African Women in Power
Carrying forward the African women's political lineage, from the Aba women and Yaa Asantewaa and the women's wings of the independence movements to the contemporary African women legislators reshaping democratic practice. PAWELE is how that lineage gets transmitted, with ACDEG and West African legislative tracking as the working tools.
Ending FGM & Child Marriage
The dignity of the African girl child is non-negotiable. Survivor-centred, community-led abandonment of FGM and child marriage, led by African daughters, mothers, elders and the survivors who refuse the practice for the generations after them.
African instruments. African enforcement. Our laws, our movement.
Our continental work is anchored in African legal instruments: written by African jurists, ratified by African states, given content by African feminist organising. The demand is simple, that African states do what their own signatures committed them to.
Maputo Protocol
The African feminist legal instrument. The Maputo Protocol is what African women won, article by article, and what African women now demand states domesticate rather than merely sign.
African Charter
The continental human rights charter African states made for themselves. Articles 9, 10 and 13 are the civic-space ground we organise on. Article 62 is the state-reporting cycle we hold them to. RFLD engages under ACHPR Observer Status N°553.
ACDEG
African democracy on African terms. The ACDEG codifies the democratic norms African states adopted; the ACDEG Hub is the African civil-society watchtower that holds them to it, built by African scholars and feminist analysts.
Agenda 2063
"The Africa We Want": Aspiration 6 names African women and African youth as the people whose potential the continental project depends on. We organise to keep that aspiration honest.
SDGEA
The Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa: the public commitment African Heads of State made to African women, and the one African feminist organising holds them to between summits.
WPS Continental Framework
The continental Women, Peace and Security framework: the indicators against which African states report their treatment of African women in conflict and in the peace that follows. We organise to make those indicators truthful.
African women in the African peace architecture.
African women have always been peacemakers: in the markets that conflict closes first, in the villages that displacement empties, in the courtrooms where impunity is fought. Our peace and security work supports the African actors and structures that prevent, manage and resolve conflict, from early warning and mediation to peacebuilding and the patient work of post-conflict accountability.
We organise where the women violence hits hardest live: the Sahel, the Lake Chad basin, the Liptako-Gourma cross-border zone. African women's leadership in conflict resolution, peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction is the point. Young African feminists carry the lineage forward.
Our work supports the institutional shape of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and the African actors who carry it: cross-border women's organising in conflict-affected zones, the AU Continental Results Framework on WPS, and the African women leading peace processes on their own terms.
AU Peace and Security Council (PSC)
Advocacy directed at continental peace and security decision-making, carrying what African women live through into the record.
ECOWAS Centre for Gender and Development
The regional anchor for gender and peace work in West Africa, whose agenda our organising supports.
Sahel regional dialogue
African women crossing the borders the colonial powers drew, building peace where the Sahel is being unmade.
Early warning & civic-space monitoring
African feminist civic-space monitoring across 35+ countries, published openly in the languages our communities speak.
Community-rooted.
Continental in reach. African in authorship.
Women's Political Leadership
Carrying the African women's political lineage forward across francophone and anglophone Africa: policy literacy, governance fluency, electoral skill. PAWELE is how the next generation of African women legislators prepares.
Explore →SRHR & DSSR
African women's bodily autonomy as movement work. BRAVE organises African women community leaders on SRHR and defends the right of every African woman to decide for her own body.
Explore →Climate Justice Programme
African women hold the land, the water, the seeds. The Climate Justice Programme resources African women's leadership in adaptation, demands gender-responsive African climate finance, and refuses the climate extraction African women have already paid for.
Explore →Health in Francophone Africa
African women's health, organised on francophone African terms. Maternal health, the end of malaria, and SRHR delivery, correcting a global health frame that arrives in English and leaves francophone African women under-resourced.
Explore →African feminist knowledge.
Open. Trilingual. Built for the movement.
Twelve open tools maintained by RFLD as African feminist public goods. Verified, citable, downloadable. Knowledge belongs to the movements that produce it.
AU Mechanisms Demystified
African civil-society guides to the AU, written by African feminists who have done the navigation themselves.
ACDEG Hub
African civil-society watchtower on the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance.
Maputo Protocol Hub
Tracking African states' compliance with the Maputo Protocol, the African feminist legal instrument.
African Digital Safety Compendium
Continental African reference on technology-facilitated violence against African women defenders.
Francophone Human Rights MOOC
Francophone African human rights learning platform, built for grassroots African feminists.
Gender-Responsive Budgeting
African gender-responsive budgeting tools, refusing the fiscal politics that leave African women out of the accounts.
West Africa Legislative Platform
The only consolidated database of women's rights legislation across ECOWAS, built by African feminist analysts.
Maternal Health Data
Francophone African maternal, newborn and child health data, published openly and in French.
Ending Malaria
African feminist data on malaria: gender-disaggregated, openly licensed.
My Health, My Right
Francophone African SRHR rights-literacy platform, for African women claiming what is already theirs.
Climate Action Platform
Gender-disaggregated African climate data, built so African women can hold their states to the commitments they signed.
RFLD Countries Data Center
Country-by-country African gender and rights indicators across 35+ African nations: the continental ledger African feminists insisted on.
African feminist work in the global development frame.
The 2030 Agenda, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and the Paris Agreement are the global frames African states signed up to. We organise to ensure those frames carry African women's priorities, not the other way around.
Our work advances SDGs 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 13, 16 and 17, together with the financing commitments African states made for themselves at Addis Ababa and Paris. The global frame is a tool; African feminist organising is the politics.
Moving the money to the women doing the work.
The West African Francophone Feminist Fund (WAFFF) moves resources from institutional donors to the grassroots francophone African women's collectives organising the actual work: feminist movement-building, defender protection, the daily refusal of patriarchal violence. Moving resources to the grassroots is a transfer of power.
Explore WAFFF FundAccountable to the movement first.
Our accountability runs first to the 670 African women-led organisations that constitute our network, and second to the donors who resource the work. In 2025 we moved $1.77M across 35+ African countries with 85% of every dollar reaching field organising. Audits, safeguarding and compliance documentation are open to partners on request. African feminist transparency is movement practice.
Global Compliance Standards
NGOsource 501(c)(3) Equivalency Determination opens direct US philanthropic flows to African feminist work. Registered in four African countries: Senegal, Ghana, Benin, The Gambia.
PSEAH Safeguarding
Survivor-centred safeguarding against sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment, protecting African women staff, grantees and the communities our network serves. No tolerance for patriarchal abuse inside the movement.
External Auditing
Annual independent audits, published openly to the network. African feminist accountability runs both ways.
AU Recognition
ACHPR Observer Status · seat on the Working Group of the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders: African presence at the continental table where African women's rights are decided.
From policy to community.
Four offices.
35+ countries of active delivery.
Rooted in francophone West Africa, organised continent-wide through 670 African women-led member organisations.
Porto-Novo
Dakar
Accra
Banjul
African feminist organising across: Benin · Burkina Faso · Côte d'Ivoire · The Gambia · Ghana · Guinea · Guinea-Bissau · Liberia · Mali · Niger · Nigeria · Senegal · Sierra Leone · Togo, plus regional engagements across the African Union's 55 member states through our policy hubs.
Resource the work.
RFLD welcomes institutional partners, philanthropists and individual sisters across the diaspora who are ready to move resources into the long-term work of African feminist movement-building. Funding the African feminist movement is an act of solidarity.
RFLD · The institutional shape of African feminist organising · 2023–2028 · NGOsource ED · ACHPR Observer · GIZ/BMZ SEA-T Co-Chair 2026 · rflgd.org