RFLD's work to support communities choosing to abandon practices that harm women and girls — FGM, child marriage, widowhood rites, breast ironing, ritual servitude, and others. Anchored in continental human-rights law and grounded in the conviction that durable change is led by communities themselves, not imposed from outside.
RFLD's work to end harmful practices is anchored in Article 5 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa — the Maputo Protocol. Article 5 commits AU member states to prohibit and condemn all forms of harmful practices that negatively affect the human rights of women and girls — including, but not limited to, female genital mutilation.
The article requires public awareness, the prohibition of all forms of FGM through legislative measures backed by sanctions, the provision of support to victims, and protection of women at risk. Article 6 sets the minimum age of marriage at 18 and requires registration of all marriages. Article 20 protects widows from inhumane treatment and dispossession. Together, these provisions form the continental legal framework for the work on this page.
At the regional level, the ECOWAS Supplementary Act on Equality of Rights between Women and Men for Sustainable Development (2015) gives effect to these protections across West African states. RFLD's Maputo Protocol Hub tracks implementation across all 55 AU member states.
The page is organised around four mutually-reinforcing pillars. Together they describe how RFLD works with communities to support the abandonment of harmful practices — through cultural dialogue, religious and traditional leadership engagement, legal frameworks, and survivor support.
Article 5 of the Maputo Protocol uses the phrase "all forms of harmful practices" deliberately — recognising that these practices are many, that they vary across cultures and regions, and that the rights framework cannot be limited to any single one. RFLD's work covers the practices below, identified across the countries where we and our member organisations operate.
The partial or total removal of external female genitalia, or other injury to female genital organs for non-medical reasons. Causes severe lifelong health, sexual, obstetric, and psychological harm. UNICEF estimates roughly 230 million girls and women alive today globally have undergone FGM, with the practice concentrated across the African continent.
Marriage before the age of 18 — formal or informal. Robs girls of education, agency, and the conditions for healthy adolescent development. Drives early pregnancy, intimate partner violence, and intergenerational poverty. Approximately one in three girls in Sub-Saharan Africa is married before 18 (UNICEF).
A range of practices imposed on widows — including isolation, prescribed dress, ritual cleansing, dispossession of property, levirate marriage (forced remarriage to a male relative of the deceased), and exclusion from inheritance. All inflict harm on women already grieving and economically vulnerable.
The pounding or massaging of an adolescent girl's developing breasts using heated objects, intended to delay or hide signs of puberty. Causes pain, tissue damage, scarring, and lasting psychological harm. Often performed by mothers or grandmothers, who report doing it to protect daughters from male sexual attention or unwanted marriage proposals.
The practice — known as Trokosi in parts of Ghana and Togo, and by other names elsewhere — of pledging girls to traditional shrines to atone for offences allegedly committed by family members. Girls bonded into ritual servitude have historically faced sexual exploitation, forced labour, and denial of education. Outlawed in Ghana since 1998 but persists in some communities.
The cultural valuation of sons over daughters, expressed through differential investment in education, nutrition, and health care; in some regions through sex-selective practices and through the deprioritising of daughters from inheritance and family decision-making. Reinforces every other harmful practice in this catalogue and often shapes which children survive infancy.
These practices are often defended as "culture." Our analysis is more specific: they are mechanisms for the regulation of female sexuality, reproduction, and economic standing — and they persist because the social and economic systems around them are still organised to require them.
Decades of evidence in the field of harmful practices points to a single conclusion: laws alone do not change practices, and outside campaigns rarely produce durable abandonment. What works is sustained dialogue — with the elders, religious leaders, mothers, fathers, and young people who together constitute the social systems in which these practices are embedded. RFLD's methodology is grounded in the Community Conversations approach.
Enter the community through trusted local partners — RFLD member organisations, women's groups, faith leaders, and local administrators. Listen before speaking.
Provide accurate information on the health, legal, and developmental consequences of the practice — without shaming families who have practiced or undergone it.
Support communities ready to commit to abandonment to make their decision publicly, with full participation from all groups affected — women, men, elders, youth, religious authorities.
Establish community-level accountability groups — chosen and led by community members — to support continued change and respond to the pressure to revert.
For communities choosing to end FGM, RFLD supports the development of alternative rites of passage — ceremonies that mark a girl's transition into adolescence or womanhood with the dignity, community recognition, and education such transitions deserve, but without cutting. Alternative rites are designed by community members themselves, drawing on their own cultural traditions; RFLD's role is supportive, not prescriptive.
For child marriage in particular, the most consistent finding across decades of research is that keeping girls in school dramatically reduces marriage before 18. School attendance changes the calculus for families. RFLD prioritises the conditions that allow girls to stay in school — addressing the economic, infrastructural, and social pressures that pull them out.
Where outside voices are received with suspicion, the voices that already command authority within the community can produce shifts that no external advocate can. RFLD's leadership engagement work is built around this principle — recognising that traditional authorities, religious leaders, and male family members are not obstacles to be overcome but partners to be engaged.
Across many parts of Africa, traditional and customary authorities — chiefs, queen mothers, council elders — hold significant influence over community norms, including those governing marriage, inheritance, and rites of passage. RFLD partners with leaders willing to use their authority to support the protection of girls and women.
Both Islamic and Christian religious authorities have, in many countries, played decisive roles in shifting community norms on FGM, child marriage, and widowhood rites. RFLD engages religious leaders on the absence of religious basis for FGM, on Quranic and Biblical teachings supporting the protection of children and widows, and on the role of faith leaders as guardians of the vulnerable.
The traditional cutters whose work is FGM, the ritual functionaries who perform widowhood rites, the mothers and grandmothers who carry out breast ironing — all hold direct authority on the practices. RFLD's work with former practitioners is grounded in the recognition that they often carry significant economic and social investment in the practice, and that durable change includes pathways for them.
Harmful practices are sustained by social systems involving men, women, and elders together. Engaging men and boys as allies is not an optional add-on to the work — it is core to changing the conditions under which these practices persist. RFLD's engagement is rooted in the recognition that men and boys benefit from gender equality and have legitimate roles as protectors of the women and girls in their families.
Laws alone cannot change cultures, but they set the standard against which states and communities are held to account. RFLD advocates for the harmonisation of national laws with the Maputo Protocol, the ratification and domestication of the ECOWAS Supplementary Act, and — crucially — the training of police, prosecutors, and judges to enforce existing laws. A law not enforced is not a law.
Article 5 prohibits all forms of harmful practices. Article 6 sets the minimum age of marriage at 18. RFLD tracks state compliance through the Maputo Protocol Hub and supports civil society shadow reporting.
The 2015 Supplementary Act on Equality of Rights gives effect to women's-rights protections across all 15 ECOWAS member states — including specific commitments on harmful practices.
RFLD supports advocacy for the criminalisation of FGM, child marriage, and widowhood rites under national law — closing loopholes (e.g. parental consent exceptions, religious exceptions) that undermine implementation.
Most prosecutions fail not for lack of law but for lack of enforcement capacity. RFLD trains law-enforcement actors to treat harmful practices as criminal matters — not as private family affairs.
A girl with no birth certificate cannot prove her age in a marriage dispute or labour case. RFLD advocates for universal birth registration as a foundational protection against child marriage and forced labour.
Anti-FGM and child-marriage hotlines, community-level reporting points, and integration of harmful-practices reporting into police GBV desks — supported by RFLD member organisations.
Girls and women affected by harmful practices need more than long-term cultural transformation. They need immediate support — for those who have already experienced harm, and for those at imminent risk of harm. RFLD's role is primarily as a network coordinator: linking girls and survivors to the services delivered by member organisations, partner shelters, medical providers, and legal aid networks across the continent.
Survivors of FGM, forced marriage, ritual servitude, and other harmful practices live with documented physical, psychological, and economic consequences. RFLD's network response includes referral, accompaniment, and advocacy for the services survivors need.
A girl whose family is preparing FGM next month, or whose marriage to an older man is being arranged, needs immediate intervention — not a long-term programme. RFLD coordinates with member organisations and partner shelters to respond.
As FGM and child-marriage legislation strengthens in some countries, families in some regions cross borders to access the practice in neighbouring jurisdictions with weaker enforcement. The phenomenon is documented across multiple corridors in West Africa. RFLD supports cross-border coordination among member organisations and law-enforcement actors to address it.
RFLD's cross-border work is concentrated in the corridors where our member organisations have presence — including the Burkina Faso–Mali, Senegal–The Gambia, and Ghana–Togo–Benin corridors. Cross-border coordination addresses both prevention (interception of ceremonies and marriages timed for cross-border travel) and prosecution (mutual legal assistance between states).
Some forms of cross-border harmful practice involve travel between African countries and the diaspora — girls from diaspora families brought back for FGM or marriage during school holidays. RFLD coordinates with diaspora-led organisations and consular services to support prevention.
Three open-access tools maintained by RFLD as public goods — anchoring this field of intervention in continental data and legal-policy infrastructure.
Tracking ratification, domestication, and implementation of Articles 5, 6, and 20 across all 55 AU member states.
Explore →Consolidated database of women's-rights legislation across the ECOWAS region, including national laws on harmful practices.
Explore →Continental reference on technology-facilitated gender-based violence — including digital harassment of girls and women resisting harmful practices.
Explore →Harmful practices are most often defended in public debate as expressions of culture. RFLD's analysis is more specific. These practices are mechanisms for the regulation of female sexuality, female reproduction, and women's economic standing — and they persist because the social and economic systems around them are still organised to require them. FGM has, in many of its historical justifications, been linked to the control of female sexuality. Child marriage is often linked to the management of female fertility and the consolidation of family alliances. Widowhood rites are linked to the management of property and lineage when a male provider dies. To call them "culture" without analysing what they do is to treat the symptom rather than the system.
At the same time, treating these practices simply as "barbarism" or "savagery" — the language often used by colonial administrations and still echoed in some international advocacy — is both inaccurate and counterproductive. The practices are embedded in social systems that include the people RFLD works with: the mothers and grandmothers who decide whether their daughters will be cut, the fathers and uncles who decide whether their daughters will marry as children, the elders who preside over widowhood rites. Change comes when those decisions are made differently — not when the people making them are condemned from outside.
RFLD's intervention is therefore deliberately dual. We do not soften the human-rights analysis: harmful practices violate the bodily integrity of women and girls, and they are prohibited under continental and international law. But we recognise that durable abandonment is led by communities themselves — through dialogue, through religious and traditional authority, through the choices of mothers and fathers and elders, and through the legal frameworks that hold states to standards their citizens already deserve. Our work is to support, accompany, and amplify the change that communities are already debating. It is not to deliver change from outside.
The Maputo Protocol gave African women the legal framework. The work that remains is implementation — and implementation, in this field of intervention, means dialogue, accompaniment, leadership engagement, and support for the women and girls already pushing back against the systems that constrain them.
For partnership opportunities, programme enquiries, member organisation collaboration, or donor due diligence — please reach the appropriate channel below.