Legal frameworks
Advocacy for ratification, domestication, and effective implementation of protective continental instruments — particularly the Maputo Protocol, the ACDEG, and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.
Programme Fields
SRHR & Participatory Governance
Rights & Representation.
RFLD's policy advocacy and continental infrastructure on women's rights, bodily autonomy, and political representation — anchored in the Maputo Protocol, the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, and the ACHPR's evolving jurisprudence on women's rights in Africa.
Maputo Protocol Hub
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ACHPR Observer Status
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670 member organisations
Our position
What rights and representation work means at RFLD.
This page covers two of RFLD's six programme fields — Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR/DSSR) and Participatory Governance. The two fields are presented together because we hold that political representation is hollow without bodily autonomy, and legal rights are theoretical without the power to decide one's own reproductive future. Our work connects these dimensions through policy advocacy, continental infrastructure, and capacity-building for our 670 member organisations.
RFLD is not a service-delivery organisation. We do not run shelters, hospitals, courts, or schools. We are a pan-African feminist intermediary that works at three specific levels — through legislative advocacy at the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, through continental research and infrastructure (including the Maputo Protocol Hub, the ACDEG Hub, and the West Africa Legislative Platform), and through partnerships with the grassroots organisations that do operate front-line services in their communities.
The framework we work within is the Maputo Protocol (Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa). Adopted in 2003 and now ratified by 44 of 55 African Union member states, the Maputo Protocol is the most progressive women's rights instrument in the world. The substantive areas below describe how RFLD's work translates this continental architecture into practice.
§ Three connected mandates
Legal frameworks. Bodily autonomy. Political power.
Bodily autonomy
Policy advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights, anchored in Articles 14 and related provisions of the Maputo Protocol — through the BRAVE Programme and the Maputo Protocol Hub.
Political power
Building women's political leadership across francophone West Africa through the PAWELE Programme — supporting candidates, training in policy advocacy and governance literacy, and parity legislation.
PAWELE Programme
Women's political leadership.
PAWELE — RFLD's flagship programme for women's political leadership in francophone Africa. Equipping women with policy advocacy, governance literacy, and electoral campaign skills.
Explore PAWELENational parliaments
Advocacy for parity legislation (drawing on Senegal's loi sur la parité of 2010, Benin's gender quota provisions, and parallel mechanisms across ECOWAS). Training of women candidates on policy formulation, campaign strategy, and engagement with media.
Local governance
Supporting women candidates for local government — recognising that decisions on water, sanitation, public health, and markets directly shape women's daily lives in ways national legislation often does not reach.
ACDEG Hub
Civil-society monitoring infrastructure for the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance — tracking compliance with continental democratic standards across AU member states.
West Africa Legislative Platform
The only consolidated women's-rights legislative database for ECOWAS — tracking national legislation across the 15 member states on women's rights, gender-based violence, and political participation.
BRAVE Programme
Sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Bodily autonomy is the foundation of all other rights. The BRAVE Programme delivers RFLD's SRHR/DSSR work — training community organisers, supporting feminist research, and advocating for the implementation of Articles 14 of the Maputo Protocol and related provisions across AU member states.
Family planning
Access & consent
Advocacy at the policy level for the removal of spousal-consent requirements for contraception, alongside our member organisations who work on community-level access to reproductive health services.
Article 14(2)(c)
Safe abortion access
Policy advocacy for the implementation of the Maputo Protocol's provision on access to safe abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the woman.
Comprehensive education
SRHR knowledge
Advocacy for evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education that equips young people with accurate information on consent, reproductive health, and bodily autonomy — within the legal frameworks of each jurisdiction.
Field vi
Ending Female Genital Mutilation
FGM is recognised by the Maputo Protocol (Article 5) as a harmful practice that must be prohibited and condemned. RFLD's work on FGM is policy advocacy and partnership-based — we do not run direct community intervention programmes ourselves but support the grassroots organisations that do.
- ●Maputo Protocol Article 5 implementation — tracking domestication of anti-FGM legislation across AU member states through our Maputo Barometer (annual EN/FR report)
- ●Partnership with grassroots organisations running community dialogue, alternative-rites-of-passage initiatives, and support for traditional cutters transitioning out of the practice
- ●Advocacy with religious and traditional leaders — engaging the moral authorities whose positions shape community practice
Field vi
Ending Child & Forced Marriage
Marriage must be a union of two consenting adults of full age. Child marriage robs girls of their childhood, education, and reproductive health. The Maputo Protocol (Article 6) sets the minimum age of marriage at 18 and requires free and full consent. Our work translates this provision into national-level advocacy.
- ●Maputo Protocol Article 6 implementation — tracking domestication of minimum-age-of-marriage legislation
- ●Engagement with religious leaders — partnering with faith-based authorities to shift practice and challenge religiously-justified child marriage
- ●Education advocacy — keeping girls in school as the most evidence-supported protection against early marriage
Gender-Based Violence
Ending violence against women and girls.
Gender-based violence — including sexual violence, intimate-partner violence, and the technology-facilitated gender-based violence increasingly directed at women in public life — sits at the intersection of all our programme fields. The Maputo Protocol addresses GBV explicitly in Articles 3, 4 and 11. RFLD's work translates these provisions into continental advocacy and concrete tools for women defenders, journalists and politicians.
Tool · 2026
Cyber Harassment Legal Toolkit
Actionable legal frameworks, jurisdiction-specific recourse pathways, and evidence-collection guidance for women activists, journalists and politicians facing online violence.
Download the toolkit →Convention
ILO C190 advocacy
Advocacy for the ratification of ILO Convention 190 on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work — which provides the only binding international framework on workplace violence.
Continental tool
Digital Safety Compendium
Continental open-access protocols for digital protection of women human rights defenders and feminist organisations facing TFGBV across Africa.
Universality
Non-discrimination as a continental principle.
The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights establishes the universal application of fundamental rights — to life, dignity, equality before the law, and freedom from discrimination — without distinction. RFLD's institutional position is grounded in this continental architecture: human rights apply to all persons, and the protection of marginalised communities is a test of how seriously a society takes its constitutional and continental commitments.
The ACHPR has, through its evolving jurisprudence, recognised that discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity falls within the scope of the African Charter's anti-discrimination provisions. RFLD engages with this jurisprudence through our seat on the Working Group on Human Rights Defenders and through our shadow reporting under Article 62 — particularly in jurisdictions where civic-space restrictions and criminalisation of advocacy create acute risks for human rights defenders.
Our position recognises that this work must be conducted with operational care for the safety of our staff, our member organisations, and the activists we accompany — particularly given recent legislative developments in West Africa that have intensified penalties for advocacy and the criminalisation of public expression on these issues. RFLD's contribution is at the level of continental human-rights jurisprudence and the protection of the right to advocate, rather than direct community-level intervention in jurisdictions where this would expose individuals to criminal liability.
Cross-cutting
Reducing stigma, restoring dignity.
Across our programme fields, RFLD's research and advocacy works to reduce the stigma that compounds women's exclusion from health services, livelihoods, and civic participation. Stigma reduction is not a stand-alone programme — it is a transversal lens applied across our policy work, our research output, and our partnerships with grassroots organisations.
Health
HIV & AIDS
Reducing the stigma that prevents women from accessing testing, treatment, and prevention services.
Reproductive
Infertility
De-coupling womanhood from motherhood — challenging the social pressure that compounds the experience of infertility.
Inclusion
Disability
Inclusive SRHR that recognises the distinct experiences and rights of women with disabilities, in line with the Maputo Protocol Article 23.
Survivor support
GBV survivors
Advocacy that centers survivor dignity and challenges the victim-blaming patterns that prevent reporting and recovery.
Contextual analysis
The landscape of women's rights and representation in Africa.
The struggle for women's rights and political representation in Africa unfolds against a backdrop of significant continental progress alongside persistent structural inequality. The Maputo Protocol — adopted in 2003 and ratified by 44 of 55 African Union member states — remains the most progressive women's rights instrument in the world. Yet the gap between continental commitments and national compliance remains severe, and the past two years have seen tightening civic-space restrictions across several jurisdictions in West Africa and the Sahel.
Continental progress is real but uneven. Rwanda continues to lead the world in female parliamentary representation. Senegal's 2010 parity law and parallel mechanisms across ECOWAS have meaningfully shifted women's presence in legislative bodies. The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights has issued landmark decisions on women's rights and discrimination. At the same time, deep structural inequalities persist — concentrated in the rural areas where the burden of child marriage, lack of access to family planning, and limited recourse against gender-based violence converges most heavily on women and girls.
The intersectional analysis underlying RFLD's work holds that these issues — from FGM to women's underrepresentation in parliaments to the criminalisation of advocacy — are branches of the same tree. One cannot meaningfully address maternal mortality without addressing the status of women in the household. One cannot end gender-based violence without addressing the economic disenfranchisement that traps women in dangerous situations. Our intervention is therefore holistic: working at the legal, social, economic and continental-policy levels simultaneously, through the Maputo Protocol Hub, the ACDEG Hub, the West Africa Legislative Platform, and the partnerships that connect continental advocacy to grassroots reality.
Programme contact
For partnerships and programme enquiries
Civil society organisations, donors, journalists, and peer organisations can reach RFLD's Programmes team for partnership, research collaboration, and continental advocacy enquiries.
programs@rflgd.orgConfidential channel
For sensitive concerns
For confidential reports involving safeguarding, integrity concerns, or sensitive case escalation that requires confidential handling.
integrity@rflgd.org