A pan-African feminist network has released the most comprehensive continental audit yet of the Maputo Protocol. Its central argument is an uncomfortable one: the instrument’s progress is counted in ratifications, and very little else is counted at all.
African Meridian
On paper, the African Charter’s protocol on the rights of women is one of the continent’s success stories. Adopted in 2003 and in force since 2005, it has been ratified by forty-six of the African Union’s fifty-five member states. A report published this month by RFLD, a pan-African feminist network argues that the paper is most of what exists.
The African Women’s Human Rights Report 2026 is the second edition of the network’s annual review and the first to cover all fifty-five member states rather than sub-Saharan Africa alone. It runs to forty-five chapters. Its central finding is stated plainly in its own pages: ratification and implementation have diverged, and the movement that works on women’s rights across the continent lacks a number that moves when a government does something. The ratification count, the report notes, has not changed since 2023.
The clearest evidence the report offers for its own thesis is the state of reporting. Under Article 26 of the Protocol, read together with Article 62 of the African Charter, governments are obliged to say what legislative and other measures they have taken. Compliance is low and submissions run years behind. No public tracker exists from which the size of the backlog could even be read. A continental mechanism, the report observes, cannot assess implementation it has never been told about.
The decision to cover the whole continent is not cosmetic. Of the nine states still outside the Protocol, several sit in North Africa, where Egypt and Morocco have never signed. In those cases a call to ratify asks for something that is procedurally unavailable, and the report argues the demand should be reframed around accession, the quieter legal route by which a state can join without a prior signature. In West Africa, Niger stands alone as a signatory that never ratified, in a country carrying among the highest rates of child marriage in the world. The report treats a national ratification campaign there as the region’s highest-value advocacy target.
Unlike much of the advocacy literature around the Protocol, the report does not claim more than it can source. Findings are graded on a four-tier evidence scale, and where a figure does not exist the report says so and lists it. The resulting research agenda is itself an indictment. It names, obligation by obligation, the data that has never been assembled, from time-use surveys conducted in only a handful of states and seldom repeated, to the attrition between a reported case of violence and a conviction that almost no African jurisdiction publishes.
The document is unusually practical for a continental review. For civil society groups with no prior experience of the African Commission, it carries a shadow reporting template. A proposed index would let a single organisation score a state’s progress each year from public records. The tracking matrix at the back is built so that next year’s edition can measure movement rather than repeat the demand. The wager, set out in the final chapter, is that a movement able to produce a number that moves will hold governments to account in a way that a ratification tally never has.
RFLD holds observer status with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and runs offices in Porto-Novo, Accra, Dakar and Banjul, the Dakar office having opened in June 2026. The report is available in English and French. Whether it changes how the Protocol’s next quarter-century is measured will depend on who picks up its tools. On the evidence it assembles, that is a more useful question than how many more states sign.
