An Afrofeminist consultation convened by the Réseau des Femmes Leaders pour le Développement (RFLD) in Dakar on 16 June 2026 deliberately reversed the standard order of an institutional convening. Women human rights defenders, invited from across the West African region, including from the Sahelian contexts where their exposure to threat has intensified most acutely, spoke first. The institutional actors who joined them, around thirty in total, entered the conversation in the posture of listening before intervening. The methodological choice carried the analytical position of the entire convening: the women who carry the work also carry the analysis, and the architecture meant to protect them cannot be designed in their absence.
Afrofeminist Consultation on Protection of WHRDs
RFLD convened on 16 June 2026 a high-level afrofeminist consultation on the protection of Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) in West Africa. The convening, titled Solidarity, Protection and Lineage of Resistance, was held in the RFLD Dakar Office hall, located on the 5th and 6th floors of Résidence “AW 06”, Cité Keur Gorgui, in the Senegalese capital. It gathered approximately thirty representatives whose articulated engagement shapes the protection environment available to women defenders across the West African region.
Defenders' Testimonies Highlight Regional Realities
Women Human Rights Defenders invited from across the West African 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. Defenders’ testimony in the room painted a precise picture of the operational realities of WHRD work across the region in mid-2026.
From the Sahelian contexts, defenders spoke of operating with their identities compartmentalised, of organising under transitional governance frameworks that have narrowed civic space, of digital surveillance that has become routine, and of the specific gendered tactics that are deployed against women who refuse to step out of public life. From the coastal francophone belt, defenders spoke of the daily negotiation with national legal systems that criminalise feminist work, of the cost of sustained advocacy on the lives of their children and families, and of the structural underfunding that forces them to do the work as volunteers. From the lusophone corridors, defenders raised the linguistic isolation that compounds every other layer of risk.
The consultation also surfaced the inverse: what defenders have built between themselves, the peer-to-peer solidarity networks that have made the difference in moments of acute crisis, and the informal protection architectures that operate where formal mechanisms fall short.
Continental and Cross-Regional Perspectives
Mme Hannah Forster, drawing on her decades of African human rights practice, framed the conversation’s continental dimension: the consolidated experience of the past three decades has produced a clear analytical picture of what works and what does not, and the institutional record on women defenders is one of the areas in which the gap between rhetoric and operational practice has been most consistently observed. Mr Naji Moulay Lahsen of CIDH added the cross-regional perspective from the Sahel and North African human rights context.
Key Participants and Institutional Support
The consultation gathered a deliberate cross-section of actors whose engagement most decisively shapes the protection environment for women defenders in West Africa. 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 the additional cross-regional perspective bridging the Sahel and the 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); from Pr. Mabassa Fall, jurist and senior expert of the African human rights system; and from M. Sadikh Niass, senior Senegalese human rights leader. Bilateral diplomatic missions active in Senegal participated alongside the consultation.
Donor Participation and Partnership
Two of RFLD’s institutional donors, GIZ and Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation), attended the convening 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 in the consultation.
Senegalese feminist civil society organisations participated at senior level. Senior journalists covering the African human rights and civil society beats were present in the room, contributing the media witnessing layer of the protection architecture available to defenders.
RFLD's Institutional Architecture and Autonomy
RFLD was represented at senior level by M. John GBENAGNON, Regional Strategy and Development Director, while the main discussions on behalf of RFLD were led by M. Bathor Seck, RFLD Country Representative for Senegal. RFLD is an African feminist intermediary, conceived, governed and led by African women, and 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 actually requires, in a manner that respects the network’s autonomy of analysis and decision.
The institutional architecture that RFLD has built and continues to lead, namely the four offices in Porto Novo, Accra, Banjul and Dakar; the 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; the 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 the strategic guidance positions such as the co-chairmanship of the SEA-T Programme Advisory Council, has all been built by RFLD itself.
The impact of European donor support, in this sense, 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. The continuing presence of GIZ and Sida in the Dakar room reflected this sustained partnership of peers, and the two flagship engagements described below demonstrate how it is operationalised in practice.
Impact and Significance of the Consultation
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.
