RFLD's flagship programme. The operational engine of our SRHR & bodily-autonomy work — bringing together policy reform, community mobilisation, survivor-centred protection, and narrative change in a single coordinated framework anchored in the Maputo Protocol and grounded in the conviction that bodily autonomy is the foundation of every other right.
BRAVE is anchored in four articles of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa — the Maputo Protocol — that together form the legal architecture for bodily autonomy on the continent.
Article 2 commits states to the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women. Article 4 guarantees the right to life, integrity, and security of the person — including protection from all forms of violence. Article 5 prohibits all harmful practices that negatively affect the human rights of women and girls. Article 14 guarantees sexual and reproductive health rights, including the right to control fertility and, in defined circumstances, the right to medical abortion.
BRAVE's role is to translate these provisions from continental treaty text into national law, community practice, and survivor support. Implementation tracking is maintained through RFLD's Maputo Protocol Hub.
BRAVE operates through four mutually-reinforcing pillars. Each one alone produces partial change; together they shift the legal, social, and individual conditions under which women can claim bodily autonomy and freedom from violence.
BRAVE's strategic pillars apply across six interconnected thematic areas. Each one is a distinct domain of bodily-autonomy work; each has its own legal, cultural, and operational specificities. Each thematic area below links through to the dedicated programme pages where the work is described in full.
Unsafe abortion is one of the leading causes of maternal mortality on the continent. BRAVE works to translate Maputo Article 14(2)(c) — which authorises medical abortion in defined circumstances — from treaty text into national health law, clinical training, and stigma-free service access.
BRAVE's FGM work combines community-led abandonment with legal frameworks and survivor support. Approach grounded in dialogue with the elders, religious leaders, and former practitioners whose authority makes change durable — not in external campaigning.
Gender-based violence is the most pervasive human-rights violation in the world. BRAVE addresses GBV across prevention, response, and justice — recognising that survivors need integrated support, not fragmented services.
The trafficking of women and girls is a continental concern that the Maputo Protocol explicitly addresses. BRAVE supports cross-border coordination, identification protocols, and survivor reintegration — anchored in the recognition that economic disenfranchisement is the upstream cause of trafficking vulnerability.
Contraception is health care, but it is also economic and social policy. When women can plan their families, the entire trajectory of household income, education, and labour-force participation shifts. BRAVE's family planning work focuses on removing legal, financial, and informational barriers.
The Maputo Protocol and the African Charter both prohibit discrimination on any ground. Health systems that deny services on grounds of identity, sexuality, family status, or marital status violate continental law. BRAVE's work is grounded in the principle that all people, regardless of identity, are entitled to protection from violence and access to health services.
BRAVE engages stakeholders across six distinct categories. Sustainable bodily-autonomy work requires alignment between the institutions that make law, the leaders who shape culture, the actors who deliver services, the people who carry the work locally, the survivors who lead, and the researchers and communicators who shift narratives.
Parliamentarians, ministries of gender, health, justice, and youth. Local elected officials. Policy reform partners and the duty-bearers responsible for Maputo Protocol domestication.
Chiefs, queen mothers, council elders, imams, pastors. The custodians of community norms, engaged as partners in change rather than as obstacles to overcome.
Healthcare providers, midwives, police, prosecutors, judges, social workers, teachers. The frontline actors whose daily decisions determine whether women's rights are real in practice.
Women human rights defenders, RFLD's 670 member organisations, grassroots feminist collectives, youth-led movements, and the activists who carry the work in their own communities.
Survivors of FGM, sexual violence, trafficking, and forced marriage are not the beneficiaries of BRAVE — they are leaders within it, whose authority no external voice can replace.
Academic institutions, data journalists, gender-sensitive media, and the producers of the evidence that turns advocacy positions into political pressure.
Bodily autonomy is not granted by states; it is recognised by them, and recognised slowly. The work of BRAVE is to make recognition real — through law, through community, through care, through truth.
Across the African continent, the work of bodily autonomy is happening against a backdrop of well-funded, transnationally-coordinated rollback. Anti-rights movements have professionalised. Conservative legal reform has accelerated in some states even as progressive reform has advanced in others. The struggle is no longer about whether bodily-autonomy work will continue; it is about whether the gains of the past two decades will hold.
BRAVE acts as a counter-force to this rollback — not by replicating the well-resourced infrastructure of opposition movements, but by doing what the opposition cannot: working in coalition with the African feminist organisations that already know their communities, anchoring the work in continental law that the African Union itself adopted, and building a movement infrastructure that does not depend on any single donor cycle or political moment.
The four strategic pillars of BRAVE — policy, community, protection, and narrative — are not a programmatic taxonomy. They are a theory of how change happens. Laws change when there is political will, and political will changes when communities, courts, and the media demand it. Communities change when their leaders carry the dialogue, and leaders carry the dialogue when they have evidence and authority. Survivors are protected when systems are built to protect them, and systems are built when survivors lead the design. Each pillar reinforces the others. Together they form a movement.
The Maputo Protocol gave African women the legal framework. Twenty-three years after its adoption, the work that remains is implementation. BRAVE is the operational vehicle through which RFLD does that work — in coordination with the WAFF Fund's regranting infrastructure, the DƆNÙESÈ Data Center's open-data tools, and the 670 member organisations that carry the work where it actually happens.
For partnership opportunities, programme enquiries, member organisation collaboration, or donor due diligence — please reach the appropriate channel below.