KIT Gender together with Faith to Action Network and others has published a groundbreaking pan-African review of the current status of implementation of continental commitments on women’s rights.

This report will help faith actors’ advocacy and awareness creation. 2018 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Maputo Protocol, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, adopted in 2003. This anniversary offers an excellent opportunity to take stock of gaps and contestations around the realisation of women and girls’ rights, and to identify where progress needs to be accelerated. This report informs and strengthens effective advocacy efforts and strategies of civil society including faith actors towards implementation of the Maputo Protocol and Plan of Action and the realisation of women and girls’ rights in sexual and reproductive health.

Africa’s women’s rights continue to evolve and become stronger and stronger. The African Union has a strong and comprehensive normative and institutional framework on gender equality and women and girls’ rights. Five of the eight Regional Economic Communities have a normative and institutional framework on gender equality and women and girls’ rights in place: ECOWAS, EAC, IGAD, SADC and COMESA. These are binding commitments in the case of ECOWAS (Supplementary Act of 2015), SADC (Protocol on Gender and Development, updated in 2016) and COMESA (Revised Gender Policy of 2016). For EAC, the Gender Equality Bill is to be passed, and this will be binding once this happens. The IGAD Gender Policy Framework is not binding. Most normative frameworks are recent or have recently been updated and amended, to align with the Sustainable Development Goals, Agenda 2063 and other key continental and international agendas and frameworks.

Earlier reports have tracked the current status of ratification and domestication of the Maputo Protocol and the Maputo Plan of Action. Few of these explore the pathways by means of which rights are operationalised in practice, through laws, policies, administration, budgets and programmes.

The report complements existing reports and reviews by:

• Focusing specifically on sexual and reproductive health issues, and doing this in a comprehensive and holistic way
• Bringing in and strengthening a gender and rights perspective, by integrally linking sexual and reproductive health to women and girls’ human rights and addressing them from a perspective of eliminating discrimination of women and girls
• Looking at the role of and trends in Regional Economic Communities in Africa in advancing and realising women and girls’ rights in sexual and reproductive health, and
• Looking at strategies of change, and the role of a range of change agents, including continental, regional, national and subnational state and non-state actors across Africa in the domestication and implementation of continental and regional commitments; in particular highlighting the role of civil society as mediator between duty-bearers and rights-holders.

For our readers, who would like to see how Faith to Action Network members are involved in this report, we have extracted three case studies: