Field of work: Ending Harmful Practices
Across West Africa, mothers, fathers, elders, religious leaders and former practitioners are deciding to end FGM, child marriage and other practices that harm girls and women. RFLD backs those decisions with community dialogue, legal advocacy, enforcement training and support for survivors, delivered through our member organisations.
The legal anchor
Article 5 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa commits AU member states to prohibit and condemn all forms of harmful practices, including female genital mutilation. It requires public awareness, legislative prohibition backed by sanctions, support for victims and protection for women at risk. Article 6 sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage and requires the registration of marriages. Article 20 protects widows from inhuman treatment and dispossession.
In West Africa, the ECOWAS Supplementary Act on Equality of Rights between Women and Men for Sustainable Development (2015) gives regional force to these protections. RFLD’s Maputo Protocol Hub tracks implementation in all 55 AU member states.
Article 5 refers to “all forms of harmful practices” on purpose: they are many and they vary by region. These are the practices our members see in the countries where they work.
Partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the genital organs for non-medical reasons, with lifelong health, obstetric and psychological harm. UNICEF estimates that about 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM.
Where: Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and others
Formal or informal marriage before 18, which cuts short education and drives early pregnancy, violence and poverty. UNICEF estimates that about one in three young women in sub-Saharan Africa was married as a child.
Where: Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Nigeria, Guinea and others across the Sahel and West Africa
Isolation, prescribed dress, ritual cleansing, forced remarriage to a relative of the deceased and exclusion from inheritance, imposed on women already grieving and economically exposed.
Where: Parts of Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Togo and the Sahel
Pounding or massaging a girl’s developing breasts with heated objects to delay signs of puberty, often by mothers who believe it protects daughters. It causes pain, tissue damage and lasting trauma.
Where: Cameroon, Chad and parts of Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Guinea
Pledging girls to shrines to atone for alleged offences by relatives, known as Trokosi in parts of Ghana and Togo, with exploitation, forced labour and denial of education. Outlawed in Ghana in 1998 but still present in some communities.
Where: Parts of Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria
Valuing sons over daughters in schooling, food, health care and inheritance. It reinforces every other practice on this list.
Where: Found across the continent in different forms, closely tied to poverty and inheritance norms
These practices are often defended as culture. What they actually do is regulate women’s sexuality, fertility and economic standing, and they end when the systems around them no longer require them.
Pillar one
Decades of evidence show that laws alone rarely end a practice and outside campaigns rarely last. Sustained dialogue with the people who make up a community does. RFLD’s method builds on the Community Conversations approach.
Communities ending FGM can mark a girl’s transition to womanhood with dignity and education, but without cutting. Ceremonies are designed by communities from their own traditions.
Keeping girls in school is one of the most consistent protections against child marriage. RFLD works on the pressures that pull girls out.
Pillar two
Where outside voices meet suspicion, leaders who already hold authority can shift norms no campaign can. RFLD treats them as partners.
Chiefs, queen mothers and council elders shape norms on marriage, inheritance and rites of passage.
Islamic and Christian leaders have shifted norms on FGM, child marriage and widowhood rites in many countries.
Cutters and ritual functionaries hold direct authority and often depend on the practice for income.
Fathers, brothers, uncles and young men are central to the systems that sustain these practices.
Pillar three
Laws alone do not change cultures, but they set the standard states are held to. RFLD advocates for national laws in line with the Maputo Protocol and for the enforcement capacity that makes them real.
Compliance tracked through the Maputo Protocol Hub, with support for civil society shadow reporting.
The 2015 Act gives effect to women’s rights protections across all 15 ECOWAS states, including on harmful practices.
Advocacy to criminalise FGM, child marriage and abusive widowhood rites and to remove parental-consent and other exceptions.
Training so harmful practices are treated as crimes rather than private family matters.
Universal birth registration so girls can prove their age in marriage and labour disputes.
Hotlines, community reporting points and harmful-practice reporting built into police gender desks.
Pillar four
RFLD acts as a network coordinator, linking survivors and girls at risk to services run by member organisations, partner shelters, medical providers and legal aid networks.
Survivors of FGM, forced marriage and ritual servitude live with lasting consequences.
A girl facing FGM next month or an arranged child marriage needs action now.
As laws tighten in one country, some families cross borders to carry out the practice elsewhere. RFLD supports coordination among member organisations and law enforcement in the Burkina Faso to Mali, Senegal to The Gambia and Ghana to Togo to Benin corridors, sharing information, engaging ECOWAS on regional enforcement and running awareness work on both sides of each border. We also work with francophone diaspora networks and consular services where girls are brought back from abroad during school holidays.
What investment makes possible
Each extends methods our members already use. Investment brings them to more communities and more borders.
Facilitated dialogue that leads to public, community-owned decisions to abandon a practice.
Coordinated prevention and prosecution where families cross borders to avoid enforcement.
Training for police, prosecutors and judges in the countries where our members work.
A coordinated referral response through members and partners.
Calling these practices “culture” without asking what they do treats the symptom, not the system. FGM has been tied to the control of women’s sexuality, child marriage to the management of fertility and family alliances, and widowhood rites to the control of property when a husband dies.
Calling them “barbaric”, as colonial administrations did and some advocacy still does, is inaccurate and counterproductive. The decisions are made by mothers, grandmothers, fathers, uncles and elders, and change comes when they decide differently, not when they are condemned from outside. RFLD holds both truths: these practices violate the bodily integrity of women and girls and are prohibited under continental law, and lasting abandonment is led by communities themselves. Our role is to support, accompany and amplify the change communities are already debating.
Ratification, domestication and implementation of Articles 5, 6 and 20 in 55 AU member states.
Explore LegislationWomen’s rights legislation across ECOWAS, including national laws on harmful practices.
Explore Digital safetyProtection against online abuse aimed at girls and women who resist harmful practices.
ExploreWays to invest
Every route below reaches women-led organisations through RFLD’s audited systems, with reporting in English or French.
From US$500,000Multi-year, one field of work
Carry one or more of the opportunities on this page through a full programme cycle, with a shared results framework.
From US$2 millionCore support for re-granting
Move flexible grants to grassroots organisations in 15 West African countries, including Urgent Action support decided within 5 business days.
US$5 million and aboveAcross all fields of work
Back the whole network: the six fields of work, twelve open-data tools and the systems that hold them together.
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