A decade of RFLD: women’s rights, health and economic power in Francophone Africa

In the villages where our members work, women rarely start with a law when they talk about what has changed in their lives. They talk about a well that is now close to home, or a savings group that let them buy seed before the rains. Yet laws and budgets decide whether those changes happen at all, and for a long time women had little say over either.

Mrs Dossi Sekonnou Gloria AGUEH saw that gap clearly when she founded the Women Leaders Network for Development (RFLD) in 2013. Women in Francophone Africa were already leading change in their families, their markets and their neighbourhoods. What they lacked was a voice in the rooms where laws are written and money is shared out. RFLD was born to build a bridge between those two worlds.

Gloria still speaks about the work in plain terms. At the launch of a regional report by the West Africa Civil Society Institute on 5 November 2026, she told the room that what the researchers had just presented, RFLD lives every day. She also pushed back against the habit of describing grassroots women’s groups as lacking capacity. A typical feminist organisation in the region runs on a median budget of around US$22,000 a year, and with that it supports survivors, trains elected women and carries national advocacy. Read her full remarks.

These organisations are not weak. They are underfunded.

Dossi Sekonnou Gloria AGUEH, founder and Africa Director of RFLD, 5 November 2026 (translated from French)

More than a decade later, the network brings together 1,143 member organisations in more than 35 African countries. More than 70 people work for RFLD from six offices in Accra, Porto-Novo, Dakar, Banjul, Lagos and Igolo, and the network holds Observer Status with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (N°553). Behind these numbers are thousands of women who give their evenings to a cooperative meeting, who walk a survivor to the police station, or who keep a small association alive with almost no money. This article tells the story of their work, and of the decade we have spent beside them.

Starting with the law, and bringing it home

From the beginning, RFLD chose to start with the law. A right written in a treaty means little to a woman whose village chief has never heard of it, or whose government has never funded it. That is why so much of our energy goes into the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa, known as the Maputo Protocol. It protects women’s rights to health, to land, to inheritance and to a life free from violence. Today, 46 of the 55 African Union member States have ratified it.

Ratification is only a first step, so we keep count of what follows. Our Maputo Protocol Barometer follows 49 countries in 2026. Only Cabo Verde, Namibia and Rwanda are green on all three indicators, while 18 countries are red on at least one. Behind each red mark there are women waiting for a promise to be kept.

A treaty also has to be understood by the people it protects. RFLD began translating the Maputo Protocol into African languages in 2025, starting with Yoruba, Hausa, Zarma and Goun, the languages many women speak at home and at the market. In October 2026 we added Amharic, Igbo, Lingala and Twi, and the Protocol now speaks eight African languages. Hearing the text in their own language lets women ask concrete questions about inheritance, marriage or land, and find out who they can turn to. In Borgou, in northern Benin, our orientation manual on youth and women’s voice in local governance shows communities how to use the decentralisation framework set by Law No. 2021-14 to take part in local decisions.

At continental level, RFLD speaks at every ordinary session of the African Commission. Our delegations carry the concerns of member organisations to Commissioners and Special Rapporteurs, often with women who have travelled from small towns to testify for the first time. In 2025, we also created a pool of lawyers specialised in continental law, so that cases can be brought before the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights when national courts fail women.

Health and the right to decide

Sexual and reproductive health and rights sit at the heart of our Strategic Plan 2023 to 2028. For us, this work begins with a simple question: can a woman decide what happens to her own body? Too often the honest answer is no. Some women live far from a health centre. Others cannot pay for contraception, or are turned away by a health worker who judges them.

RFLD trains community educators who go door to door to speak with women about contraception and maternal health services, and works with health workers so that care respects women’s dignity. In 2021, RFLD contributed to the amendment of Benin’s law on sexual and reproductive health, which now allows a voluntary termination of pregnancy when a woman’s physical, mental or social health is at risk. A law only protects women who know about it. In 2024, RFLD convened a coalition of 26 civil society organisations in Porto-Novo, with the support of AmplifyChange, to explain how Article 14 of the Maputo Protocol and Benin’s Law 2021-12 protect women’s access to safe abortion care.

Advocacy needs evidence, and evidence needs data. Our DƆNÙESÈ Data Center gathers gender data on maternal health and access to services, so that advocates can sit across from a minister with figures in hand. Our malaria programme looks at what decides whether care actually reaches women and children: whether families ask for it, whether they know their rights, and whether local groups have the means to act.

Water belongs to the same story. Every hour a girl spends fetching water is an hour away from school, and every unsafe source is a risk for mothers and newborns. Over nine years, RFLD has built 68 wells in 30 villages in Benin, Togo and Niger, serving about 345,000 people.

Money in women’s hands

Economic justice is one of the four goals of our Strategic Plan, and it grows out of what women told us from the start. In rural areas, women grow much of the food and fetch most of the water. Yet they rarely hold a land title, and a bank will seldom lend to them. Without income of their own, many cannot leave a violent home or pay a child’s school fees.

RFLD supports women’s cooperatives such as the Wangnina Gbè Cooperative in Benin’s Plateau department. Its members turn ecological challenges into green income and campaign for women’s land titles. In 2024, we trained 30 women community leaders on rights, governance and economic empowerment, and gave mini-grants to local organisations for income-generating activities. Small amounts, well placed, can keep a cooperative running through a hard season.

Regranting is our strongest tool. Over the past three years, RFLD has granted US$3 million to African organisations. Between June and September 2026 alone, we made 27 grants worth US$722,100 to 26 organisations. Through the West African Feminist Fund and our Africa Grant Portfolio, money reaches women-led groups that large donors rarely fund directly, often because they are too small, too rural or not English-speaking. In Senegal, the Yéego Jigéen programme, supported by Fondation CHANEL, is designed to fund 50 grassroots organisations in two cohorts. Many of them will be receiving their first institutional grant.

Every gift to RFLD travels the same road, from a donor to a women-led group that knows its community well. If you would like to be part of that road, you can give to RFLD on GivingTuesday, 1 December, or on any day of the year.

Standing with survivors of violence

Gender-based violence is the issue that first brought many of our members together. Some started as a group of neighbours who took in a woman who had nowhere else to go. Today, RFLD works in communities where female genital mutilation and child marriage persist, and with the people who have the power to end them.

In northern Benin, we trained health workers in Natitingou and Parakou on FGM abandonment and held dialogues with 60 traditional and religious leaders. These conversations take time and patience. They start with respect for the meaning that families give to rites of passage, and move towards ways of marking them without harm. Leaders who join that conversation can open doors that awareness campaigns alone could not. In 2024, RFLD also took part in the campaign in The Gambia that kept the country’s ban on FGM in place, at a moment when it was under serious threat.

In 2025, we published a 254-page compendium of testimonies from survivors of gender-based violence in 15 countries, and took its findings to the African Union. Reading those testimonies is hard, and the women who shared them deserve to see things change. Every testimony was gathered with consent, and the names used are changed to protect the women who spoke. Our sexual violence resource page explains survivors’ rights and where to find help.

Harassment at work and online

Sexual harassment is one of the most under-reported forms of violence in the region. Many women stay silent because they fear losing their job, or because no one would believe them. Since our 2021 campaign to end sexual harassment in French-speaking West Africa, RFLD has compared the law in Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire and shown where victims remain unprotected. In 2023, we extended this analysis to West and Central Africa, with recommendations on reporting mechanisms, workplace policies and the role of men and boys.

As harassment moved onto phones and social media, so did we. RFLD launched a legal toolkit against cyber harassment across Africa, documented how online sexual abuse is used to silence feminists and women human rights defenders in Francophone Africa, and pressed for the enforcement of Ghana’s Cybersecurity Act against image-based sexual abuse. Inside our own network, we apply a policy on protection from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment that puts survivors first.

Stronger together

No organisation can change a region alone, and the women we work with taught us that long ago. RFLD sits on the steering structures of the Vuka! coalition, the West Africa Democracy Solidarity Network (WADEMOS), the Consortium for Human Rights and Media in Africa and the Solidarity for African Women’s Rights coalition (SOAWR). We also co-chair the advisory council of German Cooperation’s SEA-T programme. These seats let us carry the voice of small women-led groups into the rooms where regional priorities and funding are decided, and bring information and resources back to our members. You can read more about RFLD’s role in these networks.

Our members range from rural cooperatives to national coalitions, and many of them work in places where civic space is shrinking. Joining the network gives them training and access to small grants, and when they face threats, RFLD stands with them. In return, their knowledge of the field shapes everything we say, from the reports we submit to the African Commission to the data we publish in our open tools.

Simbiat Bakare, RFLD’s Country Representative for Nigeria, described what this looks like for women organising in their own neighbourhoods when she spoke at the African Commission in Dakar in October 2026. A group that stands with a survivor can come under pressure from the family of the accused, from local leaders or from officials. Watch all five interventions from the panel.

Across the continent

Benin is where RFLD began, and many of our examples still come from there. The network has grown well beyond it. Our Africa Office is in Accra, our Francophone hubs are in Porto-Novo and Dakar, and we have teams in Lagos and Banjul. In Nigeria, we are building a national network of member organisations. In Guinea, where FGM is banned by law yet more than nine in ten women are cut, a country representative and a focal point now coordinate our work.

In Central Africa, RFLD brought women’s rights organisations, journalists and lawyers together in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in March 2023, with the support of CIVICUS, to hold governments to their Maputo Protocol commitments ahead of its twentieth anniversary. Our research team has documented sexual violence against women and girls in Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Lingala translation of the Protocol was made for women in both Congos.

Our West African work keeps crossing borders. In July 2026, the Advocacy Nexus workshop in Porto-Novo brought together 30 women human rights defenders from nine countries to work on digital advocacy and their own safety. The same year, RFLD called 50 fully funded delegates from ten countries to its first pan-African Afrofeminist gathering in Praia, Cabo Verde, which brought our Lusophone and Francophone members into the same room.

Further east and south, the Amharic translation of the Maputo Protocol was made for women in Ethiopia, and RFLD teams have travelled to Zimbabwe as part of the digital civic space consortium digital rights initiative. Each of these steps started the same way, with a women’s organisation that asked to be part of the network.

Why this work matters in Francophone Africa

Francophone West and Central Africa carries some of the highest maternal mortality in the world. About 260,000 women died from pregnancy or childbirth in 2023, and sub-Saharan Africa carried around 70% of those deaths. In Benin, the maternal mortality ratio is still more than seven times the target set in the Sustainable Development Goals (see our analysis). Its feminist movements, meanwhile, receive very little of the money spent in the region. Only about 1% of aid for gender equality reaches women’s rights organisations directly. In the public gifts database of one of the world’s largest philanthropies, organisations headquartered in Francophone Africa received 0.13% of the published amounts (read the analysis). Language is part of the reason. Many funding calls are written in English, and many women-led groups do not have staff to answer them. Shrinking civic space makes things harder still. RFLD exists to close that gap, by translating, connecting, funding and defending, so that the organisations closest to women can lead.

What comes next

The coming years will test what has been built. Aid cuts are already reaching women’s organisations first, and digital threats against activists are growing. Our answer is to move more money to the grassroots, to back every advocacy demand with data and legal expertise, and to keep listening to the women who started this work with us. RFLD plans a budget of US$14 million for 2026 to 2029 to carry this work forward.

The goal has not changed since 2013. We want women in Francophone Africa to decide over their own bodies and their own incomes, and to sit at the tables where their future is decided. If you have walked part of this road with us, thank you. If you are just discovering RFLD, we would be glad to have you with us for the next decade.

Partners who want to support this work can contact our Director of Strategy and Development, Mr John GBENAGNON, at programs@rflgd.org. Organisations that want to join the network can write to programs@rflgd.org.