This week Africa celebrates the 19th anniversary of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol), and the world begins the 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence. Both these commemorations come at a time when the Africa Union is drafting its Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls making it crucial to take stock of the challenges the region has faced in making the rights in the Maputo Protocol a lived reality.
The Maputo Protocol provides a critical foundation for identifying, preventing, and addressing gender-based violence against women and girls. However, governments have failed to put in place consistent, effective measures to prevent and address this violence since the Protocol entered into force in 2005. Many countries have adopted laws, policies, and guidelines on violence against women and girls that are weak, ambiguous, and have significant loopholes. Many countries do not have a legal definition of gender-based violence, making it difficult to develop criminal laws to prosecute it and to develop systems that can effectively identify victims and survivors to provide them with support services.
Other African countries have failed to enact the necessary laws altogether. Only 6 out of 16 countries in Southern Africa have laws that set the minimum age of marriage at 18, without any exceptions.
Governments have also taken steps that directly contravene the Maputo Protocol. Six countries have entered reservations to Article 6, which provides for equal rights for men and women in marriage. In 2020, 16 African states signed the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family, which contrary to its name does not promote women’s health. Rather, it denies women and girls the right to abortion as guaranteed by Article 14 of the Maputo Protocol, which requires states to guarantee access to abortion in cases where the pregnancy is a result of sexual violence or endangers the health of the woman or endangers the life of the woman or foetus.
In 2024, Gambia’s national assembly considered a bill to repeal its law against female genital mutilation and a Moroccan court overturned the country’s first ruling to explicitly criminalize marital rape.
These acts and omissions of governments indicate that a key challenge to the implementation of the Maputo Protocol is the lack of political will. Consequently, nineteen years later, protecting women and girls on the continent is still an uphill battle:
The rate of intimate partner violence against women and girls is from 40 to 65 percent across Africa.
Other prevalent forms of violence against women and girls such as obstetric violence are not recognized in the laws of most African countries.
Similarly, school-related sexual violence is experienced by 46 to 78 percent of adolescent girls in African schools, yet many have failed to acknowledge, tackle and prevent it.
As of 2022, Africa is the continent with the highest rate of femicide as over 20,000 women and girls are killed each year because of their gender.
Most people trafficked for labour and sexual exploitation in Africa in 2020 were women and girls.
As the AU moves toward the adoption of a new convention, the focus should include generating political will among African governments to prevent and address gender-based violence against women and girls. This should be done by ensuring that government officials are themselves committed to ending gender-based violence against women and girls. To this end, African governments should declare and enforce a zero-tolerance policy on gender-based violence by government officials including through recognising such acts as grounds for removal from office and putting in place accessible and effective mechanisms to receive, investigate, and take action in response to complaints.
African governments should also work with women human rights defenders and women’s rights activists to research to understand the different kinds of gender-based violence against women and girls that exist in their countries. This research should be used to develop, enact, and implement gender-responsive laws, policies, and guidelines to address gender-based violence.
Gender-based violence against women and girls can end – if we want it to.
Betty Kabari is a women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch
