The Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) convened a high-level afrofeminist consultation on the protection of Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) in West Africa on 16 June 2026. The meeting, titled Solidarity, Protection and Lineage of Resistance, was held at the newly inaugurated RFLD Dakar Office, located on the 5th and 6th floors of Résidence “AW 06”, Cité Keur Gorgui, in the Senegalese capital. Approximately thirty representatives whose engagement shapes the protection environment for women defenders across West Africa attended.
Strategic location and operational purpose
The Dakar office is RFLD’s fourth regional anchor, joining existing offices in Porto Novo, Accra and Banjul. The decision to establish institutional presence in Senegal reflects a deliberate analytical choice: regional architecture must be anchored in country-level realities, and protecting West African women defenders requires sustained operational presence where the work is done. The office sits in one of Dakar’s central institutional corridors, within proximity of the Senegalese government, diplomatic missions, and regional United Nations offices. The location is operational, not symbolic: it places RFLD’s West African work within walking distance of the institutional actors with whom the network engages on a sustained basis. From this address, the Dakar team coordinates RFLD’s engagement with Senegalese feminist civil society, the ECOWAS framework, the Sahelian protection environment, and diplomatic and multilateral cooperation present in Senegal.
Participants and institutional weight
The consultation gathered a deliberate cross-section of actors who most decisively shape the protection environment for women defenders in West Africa. Women human rights defenders from across the region, including from the Sahelian and transitional governance contexts of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea, were present alongside leading Senegalese feminist civil society organisations. Continental institutional weight was represented by Hon. Prof. Remy Ngoy Lumbu, ACHPR Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders and Focal Point on Reprisals in Africa, and former Chair of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Mr Naji Moulay Lahsen, CIDH Sahel and North Africa Director, contributed an additional cross-regional perspective bridging the Sahel and North African human rights context.
Independent senior expertise came from Mme Hannah Forster, former Executive Director of the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (ACDHRS, Banjul); Pr. Mabassa Fall, jurist and senior expert of the African human rights system; and M. Sadikh Niass, senior Senegalese human rights leader. Bilateral diplomatic missions active in Senegal participated alongside the consultation. Two of RFLD’s institutional donors, GIZ and Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation), attended as cooperation partners. From GIZ Senegal, Mme Katja Roeckel, Country Director, joined the consultation. H.E Catharina Cappelin, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Sweden to Senegal, was present on behalf of the Swedish diplomatic mission, accompanied by Mme Khady Touré, Programme and Political Officer at the Embassy of Sweden in Dakar. Senior representatives of the Government of the Republic of Senegal also participated. Senior journalists covering the African human rights and civil society beats were present, contributing the media witnessing layer of the protection architecture.
RFLD’s institutional architecture and donor partnership
RFLD is an African feminist intermediary, conceived, governed and led by African women. Its institutional architecture is the product of the analytical and political work of African feminism. The partnership between RFLD and European donors is best understood as accompaniment to that work, not as its origin. Within this relationship of peers, European bilateral cooperation has accompanied the network with the multi-year, flexible and trust-based modalities that feminist movement infrastructure requires, respecting the network’s autonomy of analysis and decision.
RFLD’s institutional architecture includes four offices in Porto Novo, Accra, Banjul and Dakar; 670 member organisations across more than 35 African countries; the WAFFF Fund and the Africa Portfolio Grant as continental re-granting facilities that reach grassroots feminist organisations directly; the DƆNÙESÈ Data Center as a public good comprising twelve open bilingual policy tools for African civil society; a rapid response capacity for women human rights defenders facing acute threat; the State of African Francophone Feminist Movements report as a continental analytical reference; and strategic guidance positions such as the co-chairmanship of the SEA-T Programme Advisory Council. The impact of European donor support is the accompaniment that allows this African feminist work to be done at scale, and the protection environment around women human rights defenders to be addressed with the institutional weight the moment requires.
Impact and significance
The Dakar consultation was anchored in RFLD’s BRAVE programme, which holds bodily autonomy, the Maputo Protocol, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the protection of women human rights defenders as inseparable struggles within a long afrofeminist tradition. Spaces such as this consultation produce impact that exceeds the day they are held. They restore the dignity of being heard to defenders whose work is too often silenced. They give visibility to the operational realities that shape protection in the region. They create relationships that translate into mutual aid in moments of acute threat. They place institutional actors and grassroots defenders in the same room, and the resulting accountability persists long after the room has emptied. They strengthen the continental conversation by anchoring it in country-level testimony, and they strengthen country-level work by connecting it to continental support. Most consequentially, they signal to defenders themselves that they are not alone, that the architecture surrounding their work is alive and engaged, and that the lineage of resistance they carry is recognised by those who hold institutional power.
The closing line of the convening, drawn from the long lineage of African women’s resistance, framed the entire afternoon: “Celle qui arrive est liée à celles qui sont venues avant. Nous avançons en nous souvenant d’elles. She who arrives is bound to those who came before. We move forward by remembering them.”
