On Tuesday 13 October 2026, RFLD delivered its oral statement before the 89th Ordinary Session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in Dakar, under its Observer Status N°553. The statement draws on RFLD’s Maputo Barometer and on reports from its focal points, and closes with four recommendations to the Commission, its Special Rapporteurs and member states. The full text, as read today, follows.
Oral statement of the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD)
Observer Status N°553 · 89th Ordinary Session of the ACHPR · Dakar, 13 October 2026
Mr Chairperson,
Honourable Commissioners,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Forty-six of the fifty-five member states of the African Union have ratified the Maputo Protocol, according to the African Union’s official status list. Twenty-three years after its adoption, of the forty-nine countries we assessed this year, three score satisfactorily across all three indicators drawn from the Protocol itself. Cabo Verde. Rwanda. Namibia.
Three countries out of forty-nine. That is the distance between what this continent has signed and what it has done.
I speak on behalf of the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement, a pan-African feminist network of 1,143 member organisations across more than 35 countries. We maintain a focal-point network in all fifty-five African Union member states, reporting quarterly from the districts where violations occur long before they appear in national statistics.
We bring four matters before this Commission, each grounded in data we produce and stand behind.
Our Maputo Barometer scores each country on three indicators taken directly from the Protocol. The legal framework against gender-based violence under Articles 4 and 5. Girls’ education and retention under Article 12. Political and public representation under Article 9.
Thirteen of forty-nine countries score red on the legal framework against gender-based violence. Eighteen score red on at least one of the three indicators. Twenty-seven sit in the middle band on anti-violence law, which in practice means a statute exists and is not enforced.
Guinea shows what that means for a woman’s life. Guinea has ratified the Protocol. Guinea adopted a Children’s Code in 2019 prohibiting harmful practices. And 94.5 per cent of Guinean women aged fifteen to forty-nine have undergone female genital mutilation. The law is close to decorative against the weight of custom.
In Somalia the prevalence reaches 99 per cent, the highest recorded anywhere, with no implementing statute in force and no ratification. In Mauritania the Karama law remains blocked, and the force-feeding of young girls persists as a practice. In Niger, a state that has not ratified, child marriage continues to be documented as routine.
Honourable Commissioners, a treaty that is ratified and unfunded produces no change in the life of a single woman. Ratification is a diplomatic act. Implementation is a legal obligation. This Commission is entitled to insist on the difference.
In The Gambia, in the city where this Commission sits, the law prohibiting female genital mutilation was subjected to an attempt at repeal. Seventy-three per cent of Gambian women aged fifteen to forty-nine have undergone the practice, and women hold under ten per cent of seats in the National Assembly.
We raise this because it establishes a principle that concerns all fifty-five member states. A protective law, once won, can be unwound. What was treated as settled is not settled. Where a legislature moves to repeal protection that the Protocol requires, it adopts a retrogressive measure under an instrument the state has freely ratified, and it warrants the attention of this Commission as such.
Set against them, the pattern elsewhere is instructive. Liberia, the first African state to elect a woman President by universal suffrage, counts around eleven per cent women in its House of Representatives. In Côte d’Ivoire, Law 2019-870 requires at least thirty per cent women on candidate lists and offers extra public funding to parties that reach fifty per cent, yet women won under fifteen per cent of National Assembly seats in December 2025. In Benin, the January 2026 legislative elections returned twenty-eight women to the one hundred and nine seats of the National Assembly, about twenty-six per cent, and twenty-four of those seats are reserved for women. In Kenya the two-thirds constitutional rule remains unmet.
Our focal points across all fifty-five member states report quarterly on technology-facilitated gender-based violence. These attacks are directed at women journalists, women candidates and women human rights defenders, and they are effective. They produce the same outcome as physical threat, which is withdrawal from public life, while leaving far less evidence for the mechanisms designed to respond. Our protection frameworks were built for bodily harm. They do not capture a campaign that destroys a woman’s standing without ever touching her.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the Central African Republic, in Sudan and in Somalia our indicators stand at red. Sexual violence continues to be used as a method of war, and impunity remains the expectation rather than the exception.
Recommendations
Mr Chairperson, we make four recommendations.
- To the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women in Africa, to include in the next report a state-by-state account distinguishing ratification, legislative domestication and identifiable budgetary allocation. RFLD places its country data at the Rapporteur’s disposal for this purpose.
- To the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders and Focal Point on Reprisals, to extend monitoring explicitly to digital reprisals against women defenders, building on Resolutions 522 and 591, and to treat the absence of evidence in these cases as a feature of the method rather than an absence of harm.
- To this Commission, to keep the situation in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on its agenda and to undertake a fact-finding mission, and to address any attempt to repeal protective legislation as a retrogressive measure under the Protocol.
- To member states, to open budget processes to civil society scrutiny. Access to the budget line is now the practical condition of every other right this Commission defends. Where civil society cannot see what was allocated and what was released, accountability is rhetorical.
Mr Chairperson, this Commission already knows the crisis. We came with the measurement of it, country by country, and with an offer to keep producing that measurement for as long as it is useful.
I thank you.
About RFLD
The Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) is a pan-African feminist network of 1,143 member organisations across more than 35 countries. It holds Observer Status N°553 with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Media enquiries: communications.info@rflgd.org.
