RFLD's flagship governance programme. The operational engine of our political-participation work — equipping women and girls with leadership skills, transforming the social and institutional environment that shapes who can govern, and anchoring the work in the continental treaties African states have already adopted.
PAWELE is anchored in three continental legal instruments that together establish the framework for women's full political and economic participation across the African Union.
Article 9 of the Maputo Protocol — the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa — commits states to take specific positive action to ensure women's equal participation in political and decision-making processes. Article 8 of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG) commits states to eliminate all forms of gender discrimination and to take all appropriate measures to ensure the full and active participation of women in decision-making processes. Articles 13 and 17 of the Maputo Protocol establish women's rights to economic and social welfare and to a positive cultural context.
PAWELE's work is to translate these provisions from continental treaty text into national law, institutional practice, and the lived political agency of women across the continent. Implementation tracking is maintained through RFLD's Maputo Protocol Hub and the West Africa Legislative Platform.
PAWELE operates through four mutually-reinforcing pillars. Each one alone produces partial change; together they work on the individual, the community, the institution, and the evidence base — the four levels at which durable change in women's political participation has to happen simultaneously.
Each of PAWELE's four strategic pillars maps to a distinct domain of work — with its own methodologies, partners, and entry points. The cards below describe each pillar's substantive content; together they form the operational architecture of the programme.
The first and most direct pillar. Equipping women and girls — including those in fragile and crisis-affected contexts — with the skills, knowledge, networks, and material support to claim leadership roles in public, civic, and economic life.
The pillar that addresses the social conditions under which women lead. Durable change in political participation requires change in the cultural environment that surrounds it — and that change is led from within communities, not imposed from outside.
The pillar that engages duty-bearers — the parliaments, ministries, justice systems, and security services that determine whether women's-rights laws are enforced, gender quotas implemented, and GBV survivors protected in practice.
The fourth pillar transforms the work of the first three into a continental evidence base. Action-research from the field becomes data that informs legislative reform, ACDEG compliance tracking, and continental advocacy through the African Union.
PAWELE's work is delivered through coordination with RFLD's network of 670 member organisations across 15+ African countries. The programme's design is responsive to the specific contexts of intervention — ranging from stable democratic environments to fragile and crisis-affected zones — and engages multiple groups simultaneously rather than treating any one as the sole target.
Women and girls facing systemic barriers to political and economic participation — including those in rural communities, fragile contexts, and survivors of gender-based violence.
RFLD's 670 member organisations across the continent — feminist collectives, women-led grassroots groups, and the local civil society infrastructure that carries the work in their own communities.
Traditional chiefs, queen mothers, religious leaders, and council elders — engaged as partners in change rather than as obstacles to overcome.
Networks of male advocates — engaged through community forums and educational programmes addressing harmful gender norms and supporting women's leadership.
Parliamentarians, local elected officials, ministries of gender and justice, judicial systems, security services, and media institutions — engaged on policy reform, capacity-building, and gender-responsive practice.
African academic institutions, gender-sensitive media, and continental research networks — partners in the evidence work that turns advocacy into political pressure.
Treaties are easy to ratify and hard to live by. PAWELE is the work of closing that gap — between what African states have promised in continental law and what women experience in their everyday political lives.
Across the continent, the legal architecture for women's political participation is already in place. The Maputo Protocol commits ratifying states to specific positive action. The African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance commits members to eliminate gender discrimination across all decision-making. The African Union's own Agenda 2063 names gender equality as a precondition of the continent's transformation. The legal infrastructure is not the problem. The implementation is.
Implementation requires four kinds of work happening simultaneously — and that is the structural argument for PAWELE's four-pillar design. Women need the skills, networks, and material conditions to claim leadership roles. Communities need the conversations that make women's leadership socially supported, not socially punished. Institutions need the training, protocols, and political pressure that translate gender-equality law into gender-equality practice. And the entire continental conversation needs an evidence base sufficient to hold states to their treaty commitments.
PAWELE is the operational vehicle through which RFLD does that work — in coordination with the WAFF Fund's regranting infrastructure, the DƆNÙESÈ Data Center's open-data tools, the Maputo Protocol Hub's implementation tracking, and the 670 member organisations that carry the work where it actually happens. Each pillar reinforces the others. Together they form a continental architecture for women's political participation that no individual organisation could build alone.
The Maputo Protocol gave African women the legal framework. ACDEG gave African states the governance framework. PAWELE is one of the operational programmes through which RFLD translates both into the work of changing who governs the continent — and on whose behalf.
For partnership opportunities, programme enquiries, member organisation collaboration, or donor due diligence — please reach the appropriate channel below.