The RFLD Africa Team, based in our Ghana Office in Accra, gathered on Monday 29 June for its 3rd Quarter 2026 planning session and we are delighted to welcome two new members to the team: Xenia Kremer from Germany (Programs) and Faila Katoka from DRC (Regional Francophone Communications Officer).
RFLD’s contribution to the African feminist ecosystem is its integrated architecture combining four functions inside one institutional structure so that data, advocacy, resources and community delivery reinforce one another. Patriarchal violence against African women and girls is not background context, it 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. Young African women are not the future of African feminism, they are its current organisers, practicians theorists and street-level strategists. We are built from the experiences of our elders, sisterts, and mothers. African women move pushed by conflict, climate disruption, and the economic structures we did not design. African women migrants, refugees and internally displaced sisters carry the deepest exposure.
Our continental work is anchored in African legal instruments — written by African jurists, ratified by African states, and given content by African feminist organising. We are not importing rights frameworks. We are demanding African states do what their own signatures committed them to.
Why this matters
“African civil society contributes to sustainable development through the 2030 Agenda, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and the Paris Agreement. RFLD’s continental architecture is built to deliver across all these frames simultaneously.”
Explore our work: rflgd.org/our-programs
RFLD Joins the digital civic space consortium Annual Consortium Meeting in Harare, Reaffirming a Three-Year Commitment to Africa’s Digital Civic Space
Harare, Zimbabwe – June 30, 2026
From 23 to 26 June 2026, a three-person delegation from the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) joined Magamba Network, DefendDefenders, and consortium partners in Harare for the first annual consortium meeting of the digital civic space consortium — the Sida-funded continental initiative that launched in February 2026 to secure Africa’s digital civic space against state repression and corporate technology misuse.
RFLD was represented in Harare by a three-person delegation — Heuleche Tognonmegni, Abigael Olaleye, and Ashifie Gogo — and the Gender Mainstreaming session was the moment at which RFLD set out the consortium’s operational approach to its Gender Mainstreaming Lead mandate for the year ahead. Internet shutdowns, surveillance technology, and disinformation campaigns are deployed differently against women in public life. They are amplified by Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence — deepfake pornography, doxxing, image-based abuse — that the political analysis of digital repression too often treats as a separate problem. The premise RFLD opened with was simple: in the digital civic space consortium, gender mainstreaming is not a cross-cutting principle that everyone agrees to and no-one operationalises. It is a set of tools, a measurement architecture, and a line item — applied to every activity the consortium delivers.
Gender mainstreaming is not an add-on. It is a methodology, a measurement framework, and a budget line — applied to every the digital civic space consortium activity, in every country, across all three years.
RFLD’s presentation set out the four instruments through which it will deliver its Gender Mainstreaming Lead mandate across the consortium. Each had been developed within RFLD’s existing programmes and is now being adapted for the digital civic space consortium:
- The Gender Mainstreaming Tool, adapted from RFLD’s in-house methodology, applied across all the digital civic space consortium activities to surface gendered risk and design responses.
- Threat-assessment matrices for gender-responsive risk modelling — used to score how digital threats land differently on women, journalists, environmental defenders, and other intersectional profiles.
- Gender-disaggregated registration and survey instruments across every training, dialogue, and helpline interaction the consortium runs, so that the data feeding into learning systems is never gender-blind.
- Quarterly GESI accountability dashboards, published to the consortium and to Sida — a public record of whether the consortium’s aspirations match its delivery.
Three workplan commitments anchor RFLD’s gender mainstreaming work over the 36 months of the digital civic space consortium. First, more than 50% women’s participation across all the digital civic space consortium activities, training cohorts, and convenings. Second, 12 gender accountability reports — one per quarter — published over the three-year cycle. Third, at least 40% of budget directed to women-led organisations, women human rights defenders, and gender-responsive interventions. These targets are not aspirations; they are reportable indicators inside the consortium’s monitoring framework.
The francophone digital rights ecosystem is chronically under-resourced. The digital civic space consortium’s reach into Francophone Africa flows directly through RFLD’s existing presence.
RFLD also took the opportunity to walk consortium partners through the live monitoring system it will operate for Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence. The system tracks incident type — deepfake pornography, doxxing, image-based abuse, coordinated harassment — by country, by adversary type, and by the profile of the targeted person. Data from the system feeds into RFLD’s diplomatic advocacy work and into the technical dossiers RFLD prepares for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the United Nations.
The conversation that followed RFLD’s presentation made clear that gender mainstreaming will not sit on the shoulders of one partner. Magamba Network and DefendDefenders engaged directly with how the tools would integrate into their own workstreams from the SafeSisters training cohort to News Factory and the Civic Cloud. The session closed with a shared understanding that every the digital civic space consortium activity, in every country, will be measured against the GESI architecture RFLD presented. The conviction that runs through RFLD’s session is not a thematic add-on; it is what the organisation is. RFLD is a pan-African afrofeminist network — its methodology was built inside African feminist political thought, refined across years of pan-African organising, and codified in the proprietary Gender Mainstreaming Tool. That distinction matters in the digital civic space consortium because gender-aware programming and afrofeminist programming are not the same thing, and the consortium’s continental-scale measurement architecture has to be carried by an Implementing Partner that owns the methodology rather than borrows it.
The force underwriting that identity is institutional. Four registered country offices in Porto-Novo, Dakar, Accra, and Banjul. A member network of 1,143 civil-society organisations across 35+ African countries. Active programme delivery in 15+ countries. ACHPR Observer Status No. 553/2017, which lifts the gender-mainstreaming work into continental diplomatic engagement through shadow reports and Special Rapporteur dossiers. Continental policy reach via the DƆNÙESÈ Data Center, the Maputo Protocol Hub, and the ACDEG Hub, which extends to all 55 African Union member states. And the Women Human Rights Defender protection mandate, which ensures the Gender Mainstreaming Tool does not stop at the dashboard but reaches the women whose work makes them targets.
The articulation between RFLD’s gender mainstreaming work and the rest of the digital civic space consortium was made explicit by Aurra Nicole during the Harvesting the Day reflection that followed: gender is not an additional layer applied over the work, but a lens through which the work is designed in the first place. The consortium walked out of the session with that lens in place.
ADVOCACY NEXUS 2026 – Save The Date : 13 – 15 July 2026
Advocacy Nexus is an activity under the Digital Resilience of Women Human Rights Defenders of the Human Rights in Francophone West Africa project flagship project : the Afrofeminist Initiative for Human Rights Development in Francophone West Africa — led by RFLD over 2025–2028.
The Human Rights in Francophone West Africa project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) with implementation support from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. RFLD is one among African feminist organisations in the flagship SEA-T cohort (Society · Equality · Africa · Transformation), funded by BMZ and implemented by GIZ, and RFLD holds the 2026 co-chair of the SEA-T Programme Advisory Council. The Advocacy Nexus workshop sits at the articulated meeting point of these two institutional engagements.
Held 13–15 July 2026, Advocacy Nexus is a pan-African Francophone convergence on advocacy, digital practice, and security for women human rights defenders — Networking · Action · Capacity Building. RFLD has designed it as a three-day strategic sanctuary where these three areas of expertise are taught together — by peers, for peers, in the participants’ working language. This intensive workshop brings together thirty Francophone women human rights defenders from West Africa and is anchored in the Maputo Protocol, CEDAW, and the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, continuing the work of the ACHPR Special Rapporteur’s Working Group on Human Rights Defenders.
