Every year on International Women’s Day, we are encouraged to celebrate progress. We are shown charts, slogans, and carefully worded speeches that suggest the arc of history is bending in the right direction.
For many African women, that message feels increasingly out of touch.
Across the continent, women’s rights are not just stalled. In many places, they are under open attack. This is not accidental. UN Women has warned that gender equality globally is facing a growing backlash, marked by shrinking civic space, rising authoritarianism, and increased targeting of feminist movements. Africa is living this reality in real time.
The backlash is visible in laws and policies, but it is felt most sharply in women’s bodies and lives.
In recent election cycles, violence against women in politics has become more blatant. In Uganda, feminist women leaders and activists were abducted, arbitrarily detained, and tortured during and after the election period, according to reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Their punishment was not only for opposing the state but also for daring to do so as women. Their bodies were used as warnings, illustrating how quickly political repression becomes gendered violence.
Conflict elsewhere tells a similar story. From Sudan to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, sexual violence continues to be used as a weapon of war. The UN Secretary-General’s annual reports on conflict-related sexual violence consistently document rape, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation in these contexts, alongside the systematic exclusion of women from peace negotiations, despite African Union commitments under the Women, Peace and Security framework.
At the same time, a quieter but equally devastating form of violence is growing: Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence.
Recent investigations by international media, including BBC Africa Eye, exposed how a foreign national operating out of a hotel lured women from Kenya and Ghana, recorded intimate videos without their consent, and distributed them online. The consequences were catastrophic. Women were subjected to public shaming, blackmail, and sustained online abuse, with reports indicating that some victims died by suicide. Digital rights organisations such as the Association for Progressive Communications and Privacy International have warned that such cases are part of a wider surge in image-based abuse, online harassment, and digital surveillance targeting women across Africa.
Technology was meant to expand opportunity. Instead, for many women, it has become another site of violence, with perpetrators facing little accountability.
Climate change compounds these injustices. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly shown that climate shocks deepen existing inequalities. Across Africa, droughts, floods, and food insecurity are already reshaping daily life. Women walk further for water, girls are pulled out of school during crises, and women absorb economic shocks with few safety nets. UN Women and humanitarian agencies have long warned that climate change is not gender-neutral, yet policy responses continue to ignore this reality.
Against this backdrop, celebration feels premature.
And yet, this is not a story of defeat.
Across the continent, women continue to organise under extraordinary pressure. Feminist movements are resisting authoritarianism, challenging unjust laws, supporting survivors of violence, and holding states to account. Research by CIVICUS and the African Feminist Forum shows that these movements are often among the strongest remaining defences against democratic erosion, even as they face growing threats.
Men and boys must be part of this work, not as saviours, but as accountable allies. Evidence from UN Women, Promundo, and the World Health Organization shows that challenging harmful gender norms among men is essential to reducing violence and advancing equality. This work does not dilute feminism. It strengthens it.
International Women’s Day should not reassure us. It should disturb us.
Rights are rarely taken all at once. They are chipped away while violence is normalised, while digital abuse is dismissed as scandal, while women’s suffering is treated as collateral damage of politics, conflict, or climate change. African women understand this intimately.
The task before civil society is therefore not better slogans or more inclusive branding. It is political clarity and courage. It is defending feminist organising when it is attacked. It is recognising that gender justice cannot be separated from peace, climate justice, or democracy. And it is treating backlash not as an unfortunate trend, but as a deliberate political project that must be confronted.
If there is anything to mark this International Women’s Day, it is not how far we have come, but how urgently we must act. Celebration, if it means anything at all, must be an act of resistance.
